


The Tin Soldier Raid

by RKMacBride



Series: Rat Patrol in Europe [1]
Category: The Rat Patrol
Genre: Codes & Ciphers, Defection, Disability, Gen, London, Morse Code, Prisoner of War, Secret Intelligence Service | MI6, The New Guy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:14:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 35,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27703306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RKMacBride/pseuds/RKMacBride
Summary: The African campaign is over, and the Rat Patrol has been reassigned to Britain's MI6, based out of a house in London. They discover they need to recruit an assistant--specifically, an assistant whose first language is German. To their surprise, the man who volunteers for the job turns out to be someone they've already met...under very different circumstances.
Series: Rat Patrol in Europe [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2026111
Comments: 26
Kudos: 20





	1. Prologue / On the Short List

**Author's Note:**

> I had the original concept for this story/novella well over 20 years ago. However, it wasn't really suitable for a fanzine submission, so it ended up being shelved for a very long time. A few years ago, as I began posting my Rat Patrol stories here, I realized that I needed to post "Tin Soldier Raid" as a bridge between the North African setting of the series, and my RP in Europe AU. So, I began working on it again after discarding much of the earliest version which no longer fit. As I reworked the story, I began to envision this "series intro" for an imaginary "Rat Patrol in Europe" spinoff show.
> 
> * * *
> 
> INTRO  
> VO: “With the fall of the Afrika Korps and the end of the North African campaign, the men of the Rat Patrol found themselves abruptly relocated to London to continue their commando raids, this time against Fortress Europe.”
> 
> EXT. A London Street. We see the streets of London passing by, including familiar sights such as the Houses of Parliament, as through the windows of a moving vehicle. Then the camera pulls back, and we see the interior of a London bus. As it moves along roads, we see the view through the windows of the bus. It is a pleasant summer day with children playing in the streets, women shopping. We also see craters in the streets and bomb-damaged buildings. A uniformed bicycle messenger passes by outside. Presently, through the bus window appears the sign for WIMBLEDON.  
> The BUS CONDUCTRESS turns toward the camera with a surreptitious wink and a friendly wave.  
> EXT. The camera shifts to the exterior view of the bus as it slows down and stops at a bus stop. A man gets off the ‘bus, wearing an American enlisted man’s “Class A” uniform, with the insignia of a Staff Sergeant. [STARRING: Christopher George / Gary Raymond / Lawrence Casey/ Justin Tarr]. It is SERGEANT TROY of the Rat Patrol. He walks jauntily away from the bus stop toward the camera, and the Rat Patrol theme can now be heard as someone is whistling it.  
> TROY walks briskly up the street, which is lined with trees and detached town houses with wrought-iron fences or walls. He turns in at the gate of one house, waving cheerily as a middle-aged woman in tweeds and sensible shoes waves to him from her garden. She is their neighbor, Helen Wainwright the librarian.  
> TROY climbs the front steps and enters the townhouse, which is a typical late Victorian or Edwardian edifice with a ground floor and two floors above that. Upon entering, he doffs the uniform hat and parks it casually on a hat tree beside the door in the entryway. Opening a door to his left brings him into the small but cosy PARLOR, where Cpls. HITCHCOCK and PETTIGREW are sitting casually playing cards, and Sgt. MOFFITT is reading the Times. TROY waves the stiff manila envelope he is carrying and motions the other three men toward a door at the back of the parlor, leading into the next room. The rest of the RAT PATROL follow TROY into that room, clearly a formal dining room that has been repurposed as a briefing room. The walls are lined with maps and file cabinets. They seat themselves around the polished table and Troy begins detailing the newest mission. 
> 
> On Screen: WITH  
> Hardy Krüger as Cpl. Friedrich Arnheiter  
> Donnie MacDonald as Sgt. Morison  
> Brendan Gleeson as Major MacDonald  
> Christopher Timothy as Dr. John Carey, M.D.
> 
> AND Special Guest Star Mildred Natwick as Helen Wainwright

**Somewhere in France**

The damp weather and late night led the porter at the gate to pull his cloak closer about him. There was a tiny fire in the gatehouse, which seemed to do little to warm either the building or its occupant. Although there were few visitors, it was his task to remain at the gate to greet them. Although it was the middle of summer, the rain that day had made for a chilly night. Brother Étienne was crouching closer to the fire, when he heard the bell jangling at the gate. Who would that be, after Matins, hours before dawn, on a Sunday? Perhaps an emergency of some sort, or a lost traveler, or perhaps refugees—there was a constant stream of them, these dark days.

He arose from the chair and went out of the gatehouse into the dark. His heart sank within him as he recognized the unmistakable silhouette of a German officer, wearing a belted overcoat, high boots and peaked cap, standing before the great iron gate. _Mother of God,_ thought the middle-aged monk to himself, _don’t tell me he’s hunting some poor fellow and thinks he’s here... _However, he had sufficient sense to keep these thoughts to himself as he approached the tall figure at the gate. “How may we serve you, sir?” Étienne asked, with humility.

The German’s voice was quiet and weary, but his French was passable. “I must see your abbot. I have come to ask a favor.”

“At this hour?” exclaimed the porter, forgetting to be humble. “Sir, all the brothers have risen for matins and are now gone back to their beds. Can you not return in the morning, at a more suitable hour, Colonel?” he asked, seeing enough of the visitor to recognize his rank markings.

“No. It is impossible,” explained the burly grey-haired officer. “You see, I seek sanctuary.”

“Sanctuary? For whom?” Étienne did not see anyone else standing out in the road. It was not that odd for military men to see their wives or children into the cloister for protection against the devastation of war, but there was no one there.

“For myself, good brother. Will you let me in?”

It was almost a minute before the porter could take in what the man had said. _For himself? Then_... He fumbled for the keys with cold-stiffened fingers. “Yes, yes, sir. I will go and get Father Simon.”

* * *

**Somewhere in Kent**

**July 17. 1943**

As Friedrich Arnheiter took his turn shaving, Gustav Weitzel—another of the defectors now working for Intelligence— stuck his head in the door. “ _Hallo_ , Fritzi,” he said.

Arnheiter detested being called “Fritzi”—it made him feel like someone’s pet Dachshund—but Weitzel was enough senior to him that he didn’t protest. At least it was better than some of the other men calling him _das Afrikakind_ : the “Africa kid.” He nodded in reply, but didn’t speak, as he was in the process of trimming his straw-colored moustache.

Weitzel continued, “ _Oberleutnant_ Hardy sent me to tell you, there will be a visitor for you after breakfast.”

“A visitor? _Für mich_? Who could it be?” This was odd. No one whom he knew, with the sole exception of _Herr Doktor_ MacNeill, far away in western Scotland, had any idea where he was. He and his closest friend, Konrad Genscher, had been separated as soon as they had reached Britain and the processing center for POWs. He finished his moustache, and turned to look at the senior NCO.

Weitzel shrugged. “How do I know? They didn’t say. Wait and see.”

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

The English officer in charge of the prisoners regarded Sam Troy with frank astonishment. “Who is it you want to see? Oh, that fellow… Are you quite sure?”

“Let’s just say we need someone with… certain qualifications.” The leader of the Rat Patrol handed over a thin file of papers. “Everything should be in order.”

“Oh, quite…” the officer murmured as he read the material Troy had given him. “But…”

“Is there a problem, sir?”

“Oh, no. We’ll have him brought in. The clerk there will show you to the interview room.”

It had only been two months since the end of the North African campaign, but the Rat Patrol had been there even before the fall and surrender of the Afrika Korps. Once it became obvious that there was very little left for the crack team of commandos to accomplish, the Rat Patrol had been reassigned and transferred to England. They had been detailed to work in cooperation with Military Intelligence, and the major in charge of their assignment was a cheerful red-haired Scotsman, named Rory MacDonald. He had been in the Western Desert himself, and showed a great deal of energy and indefatigable good humor. 

The young man who was seated in the chair under guard looked so different from the last time Troy had seen him, about a year before, that for a moment the American wasn’t sure it was the same man until he recognized the faint white scar from a laceration on the man’s forehead. It was Corporal Arnheiter, all right, who on that long-ago day had begged the Rat Patrol to accept his surrender and save Dietrich’s life [1]. 

Everything else, however, was different now. Now the scene was not in Africa, but in England, and Troy was on a mission like none he had ever attempted before. This was one of the few camps for POWs who were considered ‘friendly’ Germans, in category ‘A’, who had volunteered to defect and to help the Allied cause. The young man’s hair had been bleached almost white back in the desert, but now it was straw-gold, and he had cultivated a neat blond mustache, which made him look older than his twenty-three years. The sunburned desert tan had faded over the long English winter, leaving him very pale. In addition, there was a pair of crutches propped against the table. “Hello,” said Troy quietly, sitting down. “I’m Sergeant Troy. Do you remember me?”

The young German nodded. “Yes, I remember. You capture us, and you helped me and _der Hauptmann_.” He smiled slightly. “I thank you for this, again.”

“Don’t mention it. How are you? Guess you’ve had a pretty rough time.”

“Rough time?” repeated Arnheiter, clearly not comprehending.

_Oh, boy, this is gonna be interesting,_ he thought. Back in the desert, Dietrich’s English had been so good that he understood everything you said, and a lot of what you didn’t say, too. This kid was obviously still learning the language. “I mean, you have had a difficult time because you’ve been wounded… when was that?” Troy knew, of course, from reading the dossier, but it was polite to ask.

“Oh,” the corporal said. “At El Alamein. The English have me a new leg _gegeben—_ given,” he corrected himself. “In the camp in Scotland I learned walking again,” he added. “In Scotland, _Herr Doktor_ MacNeill helped me very much. From his help, I can do most things. I am slow, but I can do them. But I cannot run, climb things, or drive.” Then he frowned slightly, looking confused. “Why you come here?” 

Troy leaned back a little in the chair, and began to explain. “I and my men—the same three men I had in the desert—need someone to help us. You remember them, right? We want a wireless operator to send us messages and receive our messages while we are on our missions over there across the Channel. We want him to be a German, so other German radiomen will hear him sending code and not take notice too closely. If you are willing to do it, we’d like to have you.”

“Why me? _Ich verstehe nicht_.” 

“Because your name was on the short list of defectors with radio experience that Intelligence gave me. And we’ve met you already.” Troy smiled, trying to put Arnheiter at ease. “You seemed like a good man back in Africa, and, well…let’s just say you have a pretty good reference.” _If you were a Nazi, Dietrich would’ve never had you as his clerk—he couldn’t have trusted you. But he did._ Troy changed the subject. “If I can ask, what made you decide to defect?”

Arnheiter did not answer at once; the reason was difficult to explain. Probably this American would not understand. However, he had been in the Western Desert too—maybe he would. _How do I say this with my little English?_ “Berlin sends us there,” he replied slowly. “And leaved us there to die. We needed more men, more supplies, more fuel. Our General himself asked for that, he went there himself. They—the OKW—did nothing.” Being German, he pronounced it _oh-kah-veh_ , but Troy understood.

The American sergeant sighed, and nodded in agreement. “Yeah. We saw that ourselves. The High Command left the _Afrika Korps_ high and dry, just wrote them off.” He had, of course, been glad of the Axis surrender in North Africa on May 8, several weeks before, but he could certainly understand how it would have felt to have been in their position.

That was not all Arnheiter wanted to say. “There is more. They have destroyed our own country first, and then many others. I want my country again, as it was before the Party.” He looked back at Troy again, and decided to ask—just perhaps, as a miracle, the leader of _die Rattentruppe_ might know the one thing he was desperate to find out. “I ask a question?”

“Sure,” said Troy. “What is it?”

“When have you leave Afrika?”

_That’s a strange question…_ “April,” he answered. “The second week in April. They pulled us out and transferred us here. Why?”

The fair-haired corporal hesitated, but his expression was pleading. He bit his lip for a moment, apprehensive. “When have you last seen _der_ _Herr Hauptmann_?”

 _Oh, now I get it. He’s trying to find out what happened to Dietrich. When were we at Koorlea?_ “Let’s see, we had a mission to a place called Koorlea, about the end of February. That’s the last time I actually saw him, but that’s all I know.”

Arnheiter nodded—that squared with what he had been told in letters. “He wrote my family after El Alamein to tell them I was killed.”

“Dietrich thought you were dead?”

“Yes. He sent them a letter and a box of my things.” He paused to figure out how to say the next sentence. “But also the Red Cross sent them a letter I wrote from the hospital ship, so they were very happy. My uncle wrote _Hauptmann_ Dietrich to tell him I am really alive, but it never found him. The letter came back.” He could not keep the sorrow from his voice, but it was mingled with anger. That was the heart of the matter; the only way he could avenge his beloved captain’s death was to destroy the National Socialist government with his bare hands. There was no way that he could accomplish that; therefore, as one man alone, a cripple and a prisoner, defecting was as close as he could come. “So, for that I will help fight against Berlin, against the Führer.”

_Can’t say I blame him._ “Makes sense to me.”

“Where you take me now?”

Troy shook his head firmly. “No, Corporal, you don’t understand. I’m not taking you, I’m asking you. It’s your decision. If you want to come work for us, come. If you want to stay here and keep on with your listening post duties, then stay. You choose.” He put it another way. “You have to volunteer for this job—nobody can make you do it if you don’t want to.”

“I choose? I decide?” This was new—it was the first time since his capture that anyone in authority had offered him a choice about anything.

“Yes. It’s up to you. I only want you if you are willing to do it.” Troy explained further. “We are billeted in a house in a suburb of London, all of us. That’s where we are when we’re not ‘over there’ making trouble.”

“You say you have still the same men?”

“Yeah, the same ones. Anyway, you’d live in the house with us...no barracks like this, no guards, except for a guard on the house when we are away. You’d have a room all to yourself, with the radio equipment in there. It’s not complete freedom—you can’t leave the house except under guard. That’s called ‘house arrest’. But it’s as much freedom as I can give you. If you want to come, the authorities will release you to Major MacDonald’s custody—he, and I, will be responsible for you.” He got up from the chair. “You don’t have to decide right now, but you’ve only got a couple of days to make up your mind. They’re giving me a week to get this set up. If you want to do it, tell the commandant, and we’ll take it from there. If you don’t want to come, tell him that too, so I can request one of the other guys I talked to. But I’d rather have you, if you’re willing to do it.”

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

After Troy and the others finished their evening meal, he made an announcement. “I think I’ve found the man we want.”

“Yeah, Sarge? That was fast,” Hitch croaked. He’d had a cold for the last week.

Moffitt frowned. _I know that look…._ “Who?”

“I told you MacDonald gave me the list of defected POW’s who’d be willing to work with MI. I talked to a couple of them at Ascot. Well, it turns out, there’s a guy on that list that we know…. Remember the time that we captured Dietrich when he had sunstroke?”[2]

“Yes, of course,” the English sergeant replied thoughtfully. “Why?”

“Remember his driver? The kid who surrendered to us?”

“Of course I do—I talked to him quite a lot, you know.”

“He’s on the list of defectors, and he’s a trained wireless operator. And he’s already working for Military Intelligence at a listening post down in Kent. I went down and saw him today.”

Tully let out a long, low whistle. 

“Wait a minute,” said Hitch. “That blond kid who was with Dietrich that time? You mean one of Dietrich’s guys actually defected?”

“Yeah. When I saw his name, it kind of rang a bell, but I couldn’t think why. Then when I looked at his file, I recognized the picture and asked about him. It’s the same guy, all right, and I want him. What do you think?”

“I think you’re barking mad.” The Englishman was shaking his head. “He’ll never do it, Troy, not for us. We made a regular practice of attacking their unit—in case you’d forgotten, we’re responsible for a lot of casualties in that company. Probably chaps that he knew.”

“He knows that. At any rate, he didn’t say no. And I think he’s trustworthy.”

“I don’t know, Sarge.” Tully looked dubious. “I can see all kinds of things going wrong with that.”

Moffitt chuckled, amused by the irony. “I can just see you explaining this to Colonel Hughes. Or trying to... Let’s see, you want this particular POW on the recommendation of one Hans Dietrich—whom Hughes does not know from Adam, nor would he want to.”

“Hell, I’m not going to tell him that,” replied Troy. “I’ll tell him I wanted that particular POW because I had encountered him in the desert and he seemed like a responsible kid. Which is the truth.”

“Why are you so sure this is going to work?” Moffitt frowned, curious. Troy often had these odd hunches or instincts about people, and nine times in ten he was right. There was always that tenth time, though…

“He’s got some pretty good reasons for doing it. And he’s been opposed to the government all along, apparently—it’s not exactly a new decision for him. And around the middle of June, he volunteered to defect to the Allies.”

“Good for him,” said Moffitt. “That can’t have been easy. And that does explain a few things.”

“Must be why Dietrich trusted him,” added Hitch. “We knew he’s no Nazi. And he wouldn’t have a clerk he thought would betray him to the Gestapo.”

“Yeah. There’s just one more thing,” Troy explained. “He’s lost a leg since we saw him last, at El Alamein when he was captured. If he’s here working with us, he might need some help now and then.” He looked around at all of the others. “How about it?”

Tully shrugged. “Don’t know why not. Only fair to help him some—he’s helping us, isn’t he?”

“Don’t know yet. I told him he had 48 hours to let us know.”

Moffitt drained the last drops from his teacup. “Then it’s up to him, isn’t it?”

Gustav Weitzel looked up from his bunk in the barracks, as Arnheiter made his way back into the room and went over to his own bunk. “So, _was gibt’s denn_? What did they want?”

Arnheiter sat down on the narrow iron bed. “There is an _Ami_ —a group of _Amis_ —who want me to come and help them. They want me to send and receive code for them.”

“Why? Don’t they know how to do it themselves?”

“ _Ja, natürlich_. But they want a wireless operator who sends code like a _Deutscher_ , not like an _Engländer_.”

“Could be useful,” Weitzel mused. “Are you going?”

“I don’t know. The _Ami_ sergeant said I must decide.”

“Why? And why does he want you especially?”

“He knows me, that’s why. We encountered him in the desert, _der Hauptmann_ and I.”

“So what? He’s still an Ami. Stay here, with the rest of us. You don’t want to always be with foreigners, do you? They’ll never understand you, Fritzi. At least here we are all Germans together. Exiles, traitors, defectors, but we know what we are—and why. And you and I, we do good work together.”

“That’s not all, Gustav. This Sergeant Troy once helped us in the desert, and for saving _Herr Hauptmann_ ’s life, I owe him.” _Not once, but twice..._ he thought to himself. _Once when we were stranded in the desert together, and once when Hauptmann Dietrich was lost alone in the sandstorm. I will owe this American sergeant as long as I live._

Weitzel shook his head, confused. “Your Captain Dietrich is dead, you told me.”

“Yes,” said Arnheiter sadly. “Still, I owe them a debt, whether or not they know it.”

“You should forget about that, Fritzi. I am certain they have already done so.” 

Later that evening, Moffitt came into the kitchen to find Troy sitting there, nursing a bottle of Bass. “Well?” the Englishman asked. “Do you think he can do the job?”

“I think so.”

“Hughes will think you’re stark raving. MacDonald won’t—he’s pretty unconventional himself or he wouldn’t have approved the project. But the Colonel will start having kittens.”

“Yeah, I know... what else is new?”

The English sergeant chuckled, but only briefly. “Look here, just between us—what is it about this Arnheiter fellow? Why do you want him so badly?”

“Well, for one, he’s not an unknown quantity. We already know a lot about him, just from that twelve or fourteen hours he was in our camp. We’ve got a pretty good idea of his character. Better him than some guy we know nothing about.” 

“Maybe. But that’s not all,” Moffitt replied, shrewdly. “Is it?”

Troy sighed and took a pull of his beer, while Moffitt got one for himself. “Yeah, you’re right. There is more to it. We owe Dietrich a favor. A big one.”

“Troy, I doubt we will ever see him again. His whole company was all but wiped out at El Alamein. He survived that, but after Kasserine, there’s no telling what’s become of him. He could be anywhere… or nowhere. You can’t make decisions based on what might have been.”

“Well, according to this Arnheiter kid, Dietrich probably bought it; I figure sometime in February or March, after that Koorlea business. Even so, I still owe him one. If it wasn’t for Dietrich, you wouldn’t be sitting here to argue with me. That half-crazed SS officer would’ve shot you.”

“There is that,” Moffitt admitted. “So he would have done.” _No “half”-crazed about it; he was round the bend and then some..._ “But sentiment is not a good enough reason to take this fellow on board.”

“No, it’s not. But I think we’ve got enough reasons to give it a shot.”

Moffitt sighed and got himself a beer as well. He had hoped he wouldn’t have to play this card. “That’s not all that worries me, Troy.”

“All right. What’s eating you?”

“He’s turned his coat once. How do we know he won’t change sides again?”

“If the Nazis in his camp couldn’t get him on their side by main force, I’m pretty sure he’s not going to go that way now.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s been in a camp up in Scotland—where there were a bunch of hard core Nazis among the prisoners. According to his dossier, and a letter from the camp doctor up there, things got pretty ugly—some of them even tried to kill him for not falling in line. More than once. And he kept resisting anyway.”

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

Late at night, Arnheiter lay awake in his iron bunk, thinking about the choice that the American sergeant had offered him. What to do? Friends and comrades of his had been killed by this same man, this Sergeant Troy, and his patrol... could he now work for them? On the other hand, if not for them, he and Hauptmann Dietrich would have surely died in Africa.

Perhaps Weitzel was right. An airman for the Luftwaffe, shot down during the Battle of Britain, Gustav Weitzel had been in England longer than many of the other POWs. He had had no compunctions about turning to help the Allies, having never been a Nazi nor a supporter of their regime. He’d already been a prisoner for almost three years, and as a seasoned airman, he was a natural leader for the younger POWs with less experience. He had a point—here at this compound, there were a number of defected Germans working together. They had similar reasons and similar aims...to help bring down the Nazi regime any way they could. They understood one another, being all exiles for the same cause. Whereas, if Arnheiter went with the Americans, he would be alone among enemies and foreigners who would never understand who he was, or why he had done this thing, choosing to defect.

But Troy and his men had been in the desert. They knew what it was to take shelter from the deadly _khamsin_ ; they had had the same experiences as he had, in much the same places. They knew about oases and sand fleas and hunger and thirst. They had seen the Mediterranean, and the wasteland of the Qattara Depression just as he had. The taste of sweet dates and cool water was as familiar to them as it was to him. There were so many things that he would never have to try to explain, because they would already know. Konrad knew these things, too—but Konrad had been sent elsewhere as soon as they had arrived in the processing center at Kempton Park, as the British policy was to separate prisoners who were from the same unit, and Arnheiter doubted he would ever see his cheerful Bavarian friend again. _At least I know his address,_ he thought _, and his parents have mine._ Suddenly, his heart ached with a wave of homesickness—not for Germany, but for the arid deserts of North Africa. His friends, the sea, the salt air, the flavor of fresh _hummus_ and roasted goats, the calls of the camel drivers, the relief of arriving at one’s destination safe and sound after days of trackless wastes. There had been fear as well; fear of sandstorms, fear of the enemy shells, fear of the dreaded pestilences (of which there were all too many). But it was the kind of fear that made one glad for each day that one survived, unlike the fear at home that never went away—the fear of what might follow a knock on the door at night. 

And these Americans had known the same things that he knew...and they had known _der_ _Hauptmann_ , too. They knew who he was, and what sort of man he had been: something Gustav, who had a poor opinion of all officers, would never understand. Among Troy and his men, Arnheiter would never have to explain why he would have followed Hans Dietrich to the ends of the earth. They had been there in the desert, and they knew. They might be foreigners—but they were not strangers. He sighed, settled himself on his left side and fell asleep, his decision made.

_I will go._

_**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-** _

**France**

“Colonel Krebel, what exactly do you wish us to do?” asked Father Simon, the abbot of the monastery of St. John.

“I wish to defect, Father.”

“That I cannot help you with.”

“No,” the officer admitted. “But you can give me sanctuary. I am myself a Catholic.”

The abbot eyed him in some surprise. “For a brief time, it could be done. But not for the remainder of the war, certainly. What do you propose to do then?”

“I have heard that the Church has certain—connections. It could be arranged to get me out of the country, perhaps?”

_Careful_ , thought the abbot. _He could be telling me all this to trap me into admitting our contact with the Résistance._ How could he assure himself that this Colonel was telling the truth? But, on the other hand, if he were a true penitent and a son of the Church, then it would be a grave sin to turn him away and refuse him mercy.

“I am not aware,” Father Simon replied stonily, “of what you are talking about.” He considered the situation, idly fingering a pen on the desk. “However, you may remain here for the present time. I will write to other Benedictine houses, between here and Spain. For now, be at peace. You are safe here.” 

_But are we safe?_ Father Simon could not help wondering as he returned to his prayers.

[1]“The Quality of Mercy Raid”, _Of Dreams and Schemes 8_. 

[2] “The Quality of Mercy Raid”, _Of Dreams and Schemes 8_. 


	2. The Girl on the Train

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sgt. Morison, attached to Major MacDonald's office in London, is escorting Corporal Friedrich Arnheiter to London by train so he can become a member of Troy's team. Encounters with hostile passersby and a kindly American on the train make it an eventful journey.

Sergeant Alec Morison of the 51st Highland Division, now attached to Military Intelligence, shepherded his charge carefully through the crowded train station. He need not have worried about passersby accidentally jostling the young man on crutches who was his prisoner; the throngs of people parted like the Red Sea as soon as they saw the prisoner’s German uniform, although there were a few women who seemed to regard the wounded man with pity in spite of it. Several times, the prisoner was pelted by clods of dirt, or small stones aimed chiefly at the white letters **POW** stenciled on the back of his uniform tunic.

“Here now, none of that,” Morison exclaimed, exasperated. That sort of thing went against his notion of how civilised people should act; if the Allies had the moral high ground, then they should behave accordingly, and not stone a man in the street. “I’m sorry, lad,” he murmured to Friedrich Arnheiter, once they had boarded the train, moving down the corridor to find an empty compartment. “They don’t know—.”

“It is natural. I am one of their enemies.” Arnheiter shrugged. It wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened to him since his capture.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

They were just entering an unoccupied compartment when a voice called, “Sergeant! Hold there!” Morison turned to see where the shout had come from. A guard was hurrying toward them down the corridor, sidearm drawn. “Who is this man?” he demanded. “What are you doing with him on a public conveyance?”

“He is a prisoner under escort,” Alec Morison explained, showing his own M.I. identification papers. “I am not at liberty to say more.”

“Why is he not in irons? He could escape and pose a threat to the populace.”

“As you can see,” the Scottish sergeant said calmly, indicating Arnheiter’s crutches, “he needs both hands for his crutches. He’s a cripple, and not likely to escape.”

“Are you certain of that? Mighty clever devils, these Huns... We can’t have him running free about the countryside, can we?”

Morison sighed. “He is not running anywhere when he has but one leg.”

“Is that so?” The guard eyed Arnheiter thoughtfully. “In that case, he has to take the wooden one off.”

The sergeant was indignant. “You can’t take a man’s leg away from him!”

“Oh, we’ll give it back—and the crutches too—once you’ve reached your destination and he is properly under guard.”

“He’d be helpless, man!” Morison protested hotly.

“Quite so. See to it now, Sergeant, and be quick about it. I’m sorry, but you’re not getting on this train unless I’m satisfied your prisoner is unable to escape.”

“I am an agent of Military Intelligence—”

“Whatever your mission is, this won’t interfere with it.” The guard smiled like a cat faced with a particularly plump canary.

Morison bit back what he wanted to say: it seemed to him that the guard was much more interested in humiliating the prisoner than protecting the population. He turned to the young German beside him, who had only understood about one-third of the conversation, and explained what the guard was insisting on. “I’m sorry, lad,” he added kindly, “but there’s nothing for it.”

Arnheiter shrugged, resigned to the inevitable, and Morison took him to the washroom. The sergeant helped him undress so he could unbuckle the heavy leather straps around his waist that held his prosthetic leg onto the stump of his thigh. “Use the latrine while you can,” Morison advised, and stepped outside the door to allow the younger man privacy to do so. They returned to their compartment, where the guard was waiting for them, and once seated, surrendered Arnheiter’s prosthesis and crutches to be locked away in the baggage compartment. The German corporal appeared to be much less ashamed by this circumstance than Morison himself, who concluded that the younger man’s calmness in the face of such treatment indicated that he had no expectation of being treated any other way. Unsure whether this reflected German propaganda about the Allies’ treatment of prisoners, or simply life in the _Wehrmacht_ , the sturdy sergeant resolved to make the journey as painless as he could. 

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

Doris Anderson had been looking repeatedly out the window of the train, wondering what had become of her friend who was traveling with her. Finally, the other girl arrived and took her seat, wearing a black cardigan with the small block letters **CU** embroidered on the left side in golden-yellow thread outlined in silver. Something had clearly upset her—her green eyes flashed with indignation as she slipped into the compartment and sat down in the empty seat. “Whatever’s gotten into you, Mags?”

“That poor man,” her seatmate fumed. “They’re in this car too, but I don’t see them...”

“Who? What poor man?” Her sorority sister was completely nonplussed, unable to fathom what had set Margaret Curry on the warpath once more.

“Didn’t you see, Dorrie? There was this awful scene with the guard at that last station. Here’s your sandwich.” Miss Margaret Curry tossed her wavy brown hair out of her way and unwrapped her own repast. “There’s this British soldier, middle-aged, escorting a prisoner somewhere. And the guard almost didn’t let them on the train at all. And before that, people were throwing stones and rubbish at this German boy on crutches. And the English think of themselves as so proper and polite...” she muttered, remembering to lower her voice. “We don’t stone people in the street anymore, for heaven’s sake. It’s not the first century.”

Miss Anderson, finally sorting out what Margaret was talking about, squeaked with alarm. “A German soldier? On this train? With us?”

“Yes, and you needn’t look as if he’s Jack the Ripper or something. He looks about as fearsome as my kid brother. I’d think he’s not old enough to shave, only he’s got this handsome little moustache.”

“So what’s got your Irish up about it? You’re madder than a cat in a rain barrel.”

“The guard was so... oh, I don’t know—smug, that’s it. You had to be there. But he wouldn’t let the soldier and this POW on the train unless... the guard made him take his leg off. His artificial leg! And he took away his crutches too. Just out of meanness. It’s not as if the boy’s going to do anything, with that sergeant with him all the time.” The brown-haired girl crumpled up the waxed paper from her sandwich. “I mean, it probably won’t happen, but if we had a train crash or something like that, he’d be trapped in here—he couldn’t get out. He can’t even get out of his seat.” She spotted some movement down the carriage a ways. “See, there they are.”

Dorrie craned her neck to see the two men, as in fact she had never seen a German soldier before. “Well, he might be young, but he’s probably done all kinds of horrible things to people, Maggie. You’ve seen the newsreel films. All those dreadful men marching around in jackboots—he looks just like them!”

“I guess so. Anyway, I was waiting in line at the tea stall just a few feet away from them when they were waiting to board.” Margaret shook her head. “I don’t think he’s done anything horrible to anybody, Dorrie. His sleeve bands say AFRIKA KORPS. That means he was out there in the desert in Egypt, with Rommel. There aren’t many civilian people out there to speak of. Just soldiers fighting other soldiers. I’d bet anything my grandpa was more dangerous than he is.” Her grandfather had been a notorious robber of banks and trains some sixty years before[i], and Margaret knew for a fact that he had killed two men in his misspent youth in the Wild West. “Anyway, what the guard did was awful. It’s not right to treat anyone that way, whoever they are.”

She sighed heavily and fell silent, gazing out the window as the train passed through rural southern England. There were many towns that the rail line passed through, and soon they were slowing down to make another stop. Meg Curry peered out the windows to see the station, and saw the ubiquitous British Railways tea cart and a newsstand. Her face lit up with delight as she was seized by an idea, and quickly ransacked her pocketbook for whatever money she had. “Want anything else, Dorrie? I’ll be right back, don’t let them leave without me..” The tall young Westerner sprang to her feet and was off the train at the first moment she could disembark.

_Now what crazy notion has she got in her head?_ her friend wondered.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

Unlike Arnheiter’s previous two train journeys—from Portsmouth to Yorkshire, Yorkshire to Scotland, and then Scotland to Kent—which had been mostly through unpopulated countryside, this route ran through one small village or town after another, with frequent stops. At one halt, he smiled at the view and then rummaged through his pockets for paper and pencil to sketch what he saw from the window. Morison saw nothing especially out of the ordinary, so asked his companion why he felt compelled to draw the scene. Arnheiter merely replied, vaguely, that the arrangement of the town hall, rail bridge, and church tower ‘made a good composition’; this meant little to Alec Morison, who had as much artistic instinct as the average wallaby. Soon the train slowed as it came to another station and stopped to take on water and to let passengers purchase newspapers and such sundries as the railway newsstand offered.

Several minutes later, both men were startled by a young woman with long wavy brown hair, who approached them; she carried a flask of steaming tea in each hand. She gave both flasks to Morison, and turned to face his prisoner. “ _Entschuldigen Sie_...” she began, and Arnheiter was so astonished that he dropped his pencil and stared at her in shock. “The tea cart was right there, you see,” she went on, still in German, “and I thought— well, I thought you wouldn’t be let off the train to get your own tea, and the sergeant here wouldn’t be allowed to get off and leave you alone...” She fumbled awkwardly with what she wanted to say. “So I got tea for both of you. I didn’t know what you’d want in it, so I brought both milk and sugar too,” she said as she took a twist of waxed paper from one pocket and a small bottle of milk from the other. “ _Bitte,_ take it, please.”

The sergeant smiled and handed one of the tea flasks to the young German. “That’s very kind of you, miss,” replied the sergeant. He eyed her dark skirt and cardigan, considered her age, and decided that she must be a university student—the embroidered emblem on her sweater probably represented her college. Her accent was imperfect, with strongly American vowels, but she spoke German without hesitation, as if she were comfortable in the language.

“ _Sehr vielen Dank_ ,” said Arnheiter out of habit, and then added in English, “It is very kind of you,” as he had learned to say. “But, _aber,_ I... I don’t understand. _Warum_?”

Margaret Curry looked from the Englishman to the German. “Well, it... it’s not right, what those people did to you. I wanted to do something to help you,” she said. “I don’t want you to think all of us are the same.” She kept switching between English and German, and looking from one of them to the other, as though she were uncertain which man she should be speaking to.

The young German nodded gravely, touched by this girl’s kindness. His blue eyes met her earnest green ones. “Thank you. Please know, all of us,” he said, tapping his own chest, “are also not the same.”

“I already know that.”

“Miss,” said Sergeant Morison, “I don’t know if you’re aware, but it’s forbidden for him to speak with you, and you with him. There’s a law against fraternization with enemy combatants.”

“I’m an American,” Margaret Curry said stoutly. “I don’t think that law applies to me, does it?”

“It may not apply to you, miss. But it applies to him.”

“Well, that’s a raw deal,” she said frankly, using an Americanism that Morison had never heard. “Oh, wait… silly me! I’ll be back in a jiff…” She vanished from sight.

“ _Was heißt_ ‘silly’?” asked Arnheiter, adding both sugar and milk to his flask of tea. “And… why did she bring me tea? She is not the train attendant.”

“Silly? Ermmm… _blödsinnig_?” said the Scottish sergeant. He had not used so much spoken German in years as he had in this one train journey to escort this young man to London. “And she did that for you,” Morison explained, “because she is a kind-hearted young lady.” _Perhaps she is from the YWCA. Or she might be a Quaker_ , he thought. There were many of them in the States, he’d heard, and they were doing considerable humanitarian work in POW camps in Britain because of their status as conscientious objectors.

The young woman returned, triumph in her expression. “Here,” she said, fastening on a white armband with the emblem of the Red Cross. “I wasn’t wearing this as I’m not on duty this week, but on holiday. I and other students are here in England for the summer as Red Cross volunteers. This makes it all right for me to talk to him, then, doesn’t it?”

“It certainly should, miss,” said Alec Morison with a smile. This was the first time he’d met an American woman, but she was not so different, he reflected, from the only other Americans he knew, by the names of Troy, Hitchcock, and Pettigrew, into whose custody he was to deliver his charge later that day.

“Well, I won’t trouble you long,” she said hesitantly, as she perched on the empty seat in their compartment. “But… I did want to ask you something,” she added, looking at the German POW. _I will never see him again, so this is the only chance I will get._

Morison was sipping at his tea, and wondered what she possibly could want to ask the young soldier. Arnheiter cupped the steaming container in his sturdy square hands as if it were a life-giving elixir in some fantastical story, and drank of it gratefully. “ _Ja,_ ” he said to her. “What do you ask?”

There was nothing for it but to seize the bull by the horns; there wasn’t enough time to go about this the long way. “Do you believe in God?”

Arnheiter’s blue eyes widened in surprise. Whatever question he thought she might ask—perhaps something political—he was not expecting that one. He considered what to say. “Yes, since I was young. But…” He sighed, heavy in heart. “Sometimes I think _der Herr Gott_ has forgotten us all. Or given us up.” He took another sip from the tea flask. “My country is in the hands of very bad men. The worst men on the whole earth. And God did not stop them.”

It was her turn to be surprised. “You think that?”

“Yes.”

“But you fought for those men…”

He shook his head. “ _Nein_. I fought because I must. No one asks _Soldaten_ what we want or don’t want. They say only, ‘Go here. Go there. Fight the enemy for us.’ But I did not fight for those men in Berlin. I fought for my company and my captain.” He straightened his shoulders, unconsciously, with that memory. “And he was no bad man. He is… was … the best man— _der beste Mann, der ich je gekannt habe_.” He didn’t have enough English grammar to explain that.

There was moisture in the young man’s eyes as he said that, she noticed. But she returned to her original question, and the answer. Before she went on, she removed the Red Cross emblem and put it back in her pocket. “Okay, well, this isn’t the Red Cross talking now—it’s just me., Meg Curry. God is still there, I promise you. He is. And He loves you.” She withdrew a folded paper from her pocket, and showed it to him. It was a printed copy of a song; she kept a few copies of it and “Just As I Am” in her handbag to give away. “Here, look. This poet says it all better than I can. It’s called Today Thy Mercy Calls Us.”

Arnheiter looked at it, and his eye fell upon the name of the composer of the melody, Friedrich Anthes. “ _Das ist mein Name_ ,” he said with a shy smile. “ _Ich heiße Friedrich._ ”

“That’s your name?” The smile completely changed his whole face, and she suddenly found herself blushing. “Then this song must be a gift God meant for you today. Here, keep it.”

“Thank you,” he said, unwilling to refuse a lady, “but I cannot read much English…”

“Someone can help you, maybe. See here,” Margaret said. “You said how everything is terrible, and the writer says that too. ‘ _When all things seem against us to drive us to despair, We know one gate is open, One ear will hear our prayer._ ’” She looked at her watch and realized they were almost at their destination. “I should be going. But if you wish, you may write me…” She hastily wrote two addresses on the back of the song sheet. “This one reaches me here in England, but this one is my parents’ address at home in America, in Colorado.”

Arnheiter was even more surprised. It had never entered his mind that there were ordinary people in England or America who spoke his language, or would think to address him to his face with anything but an insult. 

“ _Gute Reise_ ,” she went on, wishing them a good trip, “ _mit Gottes Segen_.”[ii] She smiled, slipped out of their compartment and was gone.

“Well,” said Sergeant Morison. “That was unexpected.”

Arnheiter’s eyes went to the view passing by the windows. What would happen next? He supposed that there would be some kind of examination or interrogation to determine if he could really be given this particular job. He’d had three such interrogations already, and each time he had nothing to tell the questioners except the plain truth. He’d been in the _Hitler Jugend_ as a boy, but so was every other boy in his school, his village, everywhere. It went without saying; it was not something which one could take or leave if one pleased, like chess or music or football. His chief contribution had been his artistic skills—he had painted propaganda art and recruitment posters for the HJ. His group leader had spent weeks searching for the perfect model for the posters, and then suddenly laughed: the best model he’d seen turned out to be the artist himself. So Arnheiter had spent his secondary school years painting self-portraits from mirrors, in idealistic poses. Later, those paintings were printed and embellished with propaganda slogans to be pasted up as posters in the area. He, and the other boys, had been told they were the bright hope, the future of Germany, the children who would lead the world. Hollow propaganda, he knew now, but how were mere children to have known that? In any case, the rhetoric, the speeches, had not interested him in the least. All he had cared about, the only thing that mattered, was keeping the authorities happy so no trouble would befall his aunt and uncle who brought him up.

How many lifetimes ago was that? He eyed his reflection in the train window and sighed. The face that looked back at him was older and more solemn than the face he had painted as a youth only a half-dozen years before.

“Are you all right, lad?” the sergeant asked, concerned.

“Yes.” There was nothing more to say, so he went back to gazing out the window and thinking about the future. What would the Americans think about him? Would they always be doubting him, or would they trust him? Could _he_ trust _them_? He thought so. The American sergeant—what was his name?—seemed to be friendly, and kind. Arnheiter remembered him that way from the desert, at least when they were not shooting at one another, and he had behaved the same way in their meeting three days ago. And the others… what about them? Arnheiter tried to remember their faces. There was the tall black-haired Englishman with the angular face, who spoke German; there was the one who wore the red _képi_ of the Foreign Legion, and seemed about his own age, fair-haired and blue-eyed like himself; and there was the sober and quiet one with serious dark eyes, who had been very kind and reserved. About them he could feel safe, he decided. If they had meant to kill him, they had already had a few chances to do so. In fact, it was their treatment of him and his captain that had originally made the young corporal begin to realize that most of what the German government had said about the Allies—and, by extension, anything else—must be untrue. Still, he couldn’t imagine how it would be to live and work together with these men. He had served under foul-tempered sergeants before, and it did not seem that the lean wiry American was one of those. His own men seemed to regard him as Arnheiter and most of his comrades had regarded _Hauptmann_ Dietrich. Time alone would tell.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

After a few hours, they arrived at last in the great metropolis, where there were Intelligence men waiting to take Arnheiter and Morison off the train, along with their luggage. He had his crutches again, but to put his leg back on would have taken him a good half-hour, and he would have needed to completely undress and begin again from the beginning. His face reddened with embarrassment at the realization he would have to go through the street, and be taken to some meeting with high-ranking officers, just as he was. However brave he could be on a battlefield, with shells flying and machine-gun rounds whizzing past his head, he was too shy to ask the MI men to wait for him while he reassembled himself. If he’d only had time, he could have made himself neat and proper as if to stand an inspection—he had made a good job of it a few weeks before, when they really _had_ had an inspection. He didn’t even have a way to pin up the leg of his uniform trousers, so it simply dangled loose as they went along through the station. He tried to smooth his hair with his fingers, but it didn’t help. It was neither short enough to look military, nor long enough to lie flat and behave itself. What it did was flop about in a collection of unhelpful locks and cowlicks. 

He was put in the back seat of an official car, and the driver took him and Sergeant Morison through London to his questioning at the interrogation centre in Kensington, otherwise known as the ‘London Cage’. On the way, Arnheiter craned his neck and peered around him at the city, but he wasn’t able to see very much. What he could see, however, was the devastation wrought by the V-1 and V-2 rockets: a pleasant-looking block of flats would suddenly give way to rubble and yawning craters in the ground.

[1] Yes, this scene is a crossover with _Alias Smith and Jones._ Margaret Curry here is the Kid’s granddaughter.

[2] “with God’s blessing.”


	3. The London Cage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a defected prisoner of war to join forces with the Rat Patrol is no simple matter. A board of Intelligence officers has a number of questions for him, and they want answers.

Arnheiter had had interrogations before; this one was not as extensive as the one a few weeks ago concerning his defection. It was, however, serious enough. Four officers sat on one side of a long table, and he sat alone facing them, with an armed guard standing at his back and a woman in a Royal Navy uniform standing by to act as interpreter if needed. At least before the interrogation began, he had been given time to use the facilities and put his leg back on.

One of the officers, a burly red-headed major who reminded Arnheiter of the Scottish soldiers he had known in the camp at Dalcorrie, seemed to be the most benevolent, and even favored him with a smile once or twice, but the others, especially a white-haired colonel and a younger dark-haired man with a thin aquiline face, bombarded him with questions in an endless fusillade. They delved like a relentless pack of terriers into every possible detail of his life: his father’s job, whom the family knew, why he had joined the _Hitler Jugend_ , what he had done while in it. How many paintings had he done for them? Had he written the slogans, or only painted the pictures? Had he ever admired the _Führer_ and his actions? Did he believe that Germany’s position was valid? The questions and cross-questions went on and on. He understood the reasons for the intense examination; after all, Troy was proposing to leave him alone, unguarded, with a radio and presumably access to sensitive information. One of the officers demanded to know why he had volunteered for the job; was it an opportunity for Arnheiter to serve his Nazi government in a way other than fighting, by reporting to them any classified information he could find? The exhausted corporal did his best to relate his meeting with Sergeant Troy, verbatim and in minute detail. Nevertheless, the officer probed deeper, insisting there had to be something more to the arrangement than simply Troy asking, and Arnheiter agreeing. Why did he choose to work with the Allies instead of remaining safe in a POW camp with his own people? He asked the same question four different ways, until Arnheiter finally could only say, “Sergeant Troy was very persuasive, sir.”

Then the thin-faced dark man scowled, and the red-haired Scottish major chortled with laughter. “That he is, that he is!” MacDonald exclaimed. “I know the man myself.” This broke the tension a little.

Then the interrogators began ferreting into his time as a prisoner. He had to explain in detail about his life at Dalcorrie, about the handful of hard-core Nazis who were among the prisoners, who threatened, terrorized, and even killed the ones who attempted to resist them. What were the reasons for his defection? Wasn’t it really just a way to get out of that camp, or did he actually embrace free and democratic ideals? As he wasn’t yet certain just what those ideals were, he was hard put both to answer and to make them understand that he really did want to do his best to bring down Hitler’s reign of terror. Arnheiter sighed, and explained it all once again to the interpreter, a tall Wren with thick auburn hair, who had been brought in to make sure that his answers to the questions were as complete as he could make them. 

Rory MacDonald frowned. He had found out all that he needed to know hours ago, and he could see no reason for Colonel Hughes, and Major Maitland to keep badgering the youth. It was clear his nerves wouldn’t take much more of it, and the questions by now were of little purpose. And Lieutenant Nicholls’ characteristic sarcasm was not especially useful, as the prisoner before them lacked enough English to comprehend it. True, if placed under sufficient stress, he might break and show holes in his story, but after five hours he wasn’t likely to.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

Troy and Moffitt found their way through the building to where the so-called interview was in progress. “Five hours now,” said the female Intelligence officer who was observing.

“Bloody hell,” exclaimed the English sergeant, appalled. “What the devil for?”

“I can’t tell,” she replied, clearly no happier about it than he was. “I’ve got a feeling they’re fishing for something and not getting it, or he’s holding back something and they don’t like it. I can’t let you in there, though.”

“Miss,” said Troy, “I’m in charge of the patrol he will be assigned to if they ever get through with this... procedure,” he explained, trying to be polite. After all, it wasn’t her fault things were going to hell in a handbasket. “You sure about not letting us in?”

“I’m afraid so, Sergeant. But you can come in here with me and listen in. It’s a one-way window so you can see in, but no one knows you’re there.” She led the way into the tiny observation room, from which the two sergeants could see the conference room with six men seated around a large table, with Corporal Arnheiter at one end of it. Major MacDonald and his aide, Sgt. Morison, were not seated, but standing along the wall. “If it’s any comfort, I think MacDonald is getting as impatient as you are to get it over with.”

Apparently one of the officers had just asked Arnheiter something over again; Troy could see the young German’s fists clenching under the table in his frustration.

Moffitt raised an eyebrow. “Do you know, I suspect they’re about to get more than they had bargained on...this I want to see.”

Facing four officers at once, however—Troy recognized the white-haired Colonel Hughes among them—Arnheiter kept his temper. But he leaned forward in the chair, an intense expression in his eyes. “Colonel, Major,” he began politely, “you say you hate the Reich, the Party. _Warum_ —why? What did they do to you?”

Colonel Hughes and the other colonel stared back at him, bewildered. “Look out the bloody window, man!” exclaimed Hughes, irate.

“Pardon me, sir. Not to England. To you, _mein Herr._ They came and took away your friends, your neighbors, in the night? In my village, yes. They make you to do wrong things, or they punish your family? They made us do it. Have they tell you that you are enemy of the state if you are in church? They tell us this. I am a painter, _meine Herren_ , but they say to me, I paint only what they want, we sing only songs they want. No more hikes, no more Scouts, no more _Wandervögel_ ; now you march so we can make you into soldiers. To us children they do these things. And more. In the camp, in Scotland, the men there who are Nazis, they wanted to kill me for I am not.”

“Ah,” said Hughes. “So you wanted to get out of there, did you?”

“No, sir, it is not so. I wished to stay for the high mountains and the beautiful place. The doctor is good, and he is my friend. But I owe a debt to a man, and I must pay. Those men in the camp killed my hut leader.”

“You were his friend, then?”

“No, I was not.” Arnheiter took a deep breath, realizing in one corner of his awareness that his hands were shaking with the strength of emotion. “But Ernst Habermann died for protect me. They kill him for that. I must fight them now.”

No one spoke for a moment. MacDonald sighed. “But, gentlemen, I will remind you that we are not here to evaluate the validity of this man’s defection. We are here only to determine his suitability for this assignment to assist Troy’s commando group.”

“On the contrary, MacDonald,” said the irascible Hughes. “You are proposing to leave this man, a German national and a captured Wehrmacht soldier, with access to classified material in the absence of any supervision by Troy and his men for a few days at a time, a week, maybe more. I think it is quite within the scope of this inquiry to verify this man’s motives and true political persuasion.”

The red-haired Scottish officer became aware that the German corporal had been interrupted in making his statement. “Pardon us,” he said courteously, with a nod to Arnheiter. “Pray go on.”

“ _Danke, mein Herr_ ,” Arnheiter replied and went on, facing Hughes again. “One more reason I have. The Reich sends us into the desert and leave us there to die of disease, or starve. _Zwei hundert tausend Männer_ , all the Afrika Korps...”

Major MacDonald was nodding slowly, the light glinting off his red hair. “Oh, aye, laddie,” he said quietly. “That they did.” The _en masse_ surrender of the Afrika Korps had been well reported in the Press only two months previously.

“We did what they sent us to Africa for, _meine Herren_. We fought like brave men. And they leave us there, no petrol, not enough food, no more bullets even. And there was no Dunkirk for us... they throw us all away like old boots.”

Unheard by any of them, Troy whistled softly. Moffitt grimaced. Apparently the young German didn’t yet know the words _abandoned,_ or _betrayed..._ words that would have been useful to him now.

One of the officers around the table, not one whom Troy knew, frowned, puzzled. “But, Corporal, you weren’t even there by then...weren’t you captured last year after El Alamein?”

“All the men I know were there, I was there too. In my heart, I was with them. And...” He stopped then, as though unwilling to say more.

“And?” prompted MacDonald gently.

Arnheiter swallowed hard, and suddenly Troy could guess what he was going to say. “And my captain is dead. It is the fault of the Reich, the High Command. They send him to his death. And for that—” Hans Dietrich’s company clerk took a deep breath, and went on. “For that, I want kill them all with my own hands. So. I hate them as much as you, or more. Is it good enough? If not, then send me back to the camp under the hill of Fionn Bheinn and be done.” His wrath spent, the fair-haired corporal sighed, regaining his composure. “If it is enough for you, then I will do what I can to serve.”

“One more thing, if I may,” asked the other major, Maitland. “Corporal, we do sincerely appreciate your willingness to be of assistance to the Allied cause. But are you not afraid, or worried, what your family will say, or do, because of your defection? Someday in future, they may find out.”

To the surprise of all present, the young German laughed. At least, the sound he made was intended to represent a laugh, though there was no mirth in it, only bitterness. “Herr Major, sir—no, I am not.”

Maitland frowned slightly, clearly not expecting that. “Why is that?”

Arnheiter looked at him and the rest of the officers around the table before he answered. “We _Deutscher_ are prisoners, sir, but we are not stupid. I know, and you know, we never see our home again.”

Colonel Hughes grew even redder in the face, and exclaimed, “What’s that you say?”

“In the camp, some men know English. They hear the radio, and they tell us the news. Your government says we never go home. All German prisoners must stay here all our lives. Your own authorities say this on the radio. They are never let us return.”

Behind the hidden mirror, Moffitt swore vividly under his breath. ““That b—— Vansittart[1],” he said, through clenched teeth. “If this mission goes sideways, it’s on his head…”

The ruddy-faced Scot, MacDonald, visibly paled. Hughes’s impressive walrus-like moustache twitched. “Nonsense!” blustered Major Maitland.

Arnheiter was not mollified. “It is true. In Scotland, Herr Doktor MacNeill told me about an island, far in the west. No one lives there, only sheep[2]. Why would they have made such a place? To hold us Germans, no?”

A dreadful silence reigned. For nearly a minute, no one spoke. Finally, Colonel Hughes, of all people, broke the silence. “It is true,” he began, and Arnheiter nodded grimly, as though he had been sure of it all along. Hughes held up a hand, and continued. “It is true,” he repeated, “that there are those unwise men who would counsel such a course of action. But I give you my word, as an officer and a gentleman, that it is not, and never shall be, a policy of this Government. When hostilities are at an end, you and your fellow citizens will be released to your homes once more.”

Major Maitland spoke up again, sobered. “Yet, even believing that was true, you are willing to work with Military Intelligence? How is that possible?”

“ _Ich habe das gesagt_. To end the Reich, I will do anything.”

Major MacDonald turned to the rest of the officers seated at the table. “I believe the corporal here has satisfied all the requirements, gentlemen. I move that his assignment to work with Troy’s group be approved.”

Surprisingly, the dour Colonel Hughes nodded. “Seconded,” he said. “And I shall withdraw my prior objection. All in favor say ‘aye’.”

The “ayes” were unanimous.

Finally, they let him go, cleared him for the job, and released him to the custody of Sergeant Morison, who had intended to deliver him to Sergeant Troy that same evening. 

Arnheiter leaned against the wall in the corridor, completely drained; he wanted simply to collapse on the cold marble floor and stay there. He was exhausted, and had a pounding headache; having not eaten since noon, he would have been hungry, except for the strain he’d been under.

“Come on, lad,” said Morison. “I’ll take you home.”

“Home? Where?” What the sergeant said didn’t make any sense.

“Home for the duration, at any rate. Let’s go. Troy’s waiting.”

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

However, Morison was surprised to find Troy and Moffitt waiting for them immediately outside the building, and was glad to turn Arnheiter over to the Rat Patrol. He was happy to drive all three of them to the house in Wimbledon, and then departed in order to return the staff car to Army HQ, at the Horse Guards building, and go home on the ‘bus to his wife and son.

Hitch was pacing the floor, looking out the window every few minutes. “Something’s gone wrong,” he said for the sixth time. “They should have been back hours ago.”

“You know how the brass are,” Tully Pettigrew commented. “They never do anything in a hurry. They gotta talk about it for a week first.”

Finally, the sound of a car pulling up on the wet pavement brought Tully to the window as well. “Here they are! All three, too...we’ve got him!” He turned to Hitch. “And our new Rat looks like he’s all in.” True, the young German was walking with crutches, but he swayed on his feet like a man drunk, or—more likely—ready to drop in his tracks. 

A few minutes later, Tully Pettigrew opened the front door to let in the three men. Once they were inside, Troy turned to face Arnheiter. “ _Willkommen,”_ he said to the German corporal, and extended his hand. “Welcome to the Rat Patrol.”

Even through the haze of exhaustion, Friedrich Arnheiter recognized what was being offered to him…something that was worth everything it had taken to get here: the right to belong. He accepted Troy’s handshake with a firm grip, and smiled. It was a genuine smile, that reached all the way to his eyes. “ _Danke Ihnen_ ,” he said simply. “Thank you.”

Troy then introduced him to Hitch and Tully, even though they had met a year before, and grinned. “Good. Now that that’s settled, here you go. Sit down before you fall down.” There was a sturdy armchair in the sitting room, and Arnheiter accepted it gratefully.

. Half an hour later, all five men were gathered in the kitchen. Moffitt had prepared a impromptu supper for himself and Troy and Arnheiter, consisting of baked beans on toast, Branston pickle, the last of their most recent brick of cheese, and hot coffee laced with evaporated milk. “There .” he said, placing the food on the table. “That should hold you together for a bit.”

Once they had eaten, Troy and Moffitt took Arnheiter to show him the rest of the house, but particularly the room that would be his. It had once been the private study of the owner of the house back at the turn of the century, but since then it had been converted into a bedroom for a later owner’s elderly aunt.

The German corporal could scarcely believe his eyes. He hadn’t slept in a real bedroom, with furniture and a real bed in it—neither a bunk nor a cot—since before he’d been conscripted into the _Wehrmacht Heere_. The bed even had an eiderdown coverlet. “All yours,” said Troy. “Time to hit the sack.”

Arnheiter didn’t know that idiom, but he could guess what the sergeant meant. “ _Ich kann noch nicht,”_ he replied, finally too tired to speak English anymore. “ _Muss mich erst waschen.”_

“How’s that again?” Troy frowned.

“Says he has to wash up first,” the Englishman explained. “I’ll show him where.”

Troy headed off to his own bed, and Moffitt showed Arnheiter where the washroom was. Unlike most houses of the period, this house had a washroom and W.C. on the ground floor, next to the room made over for the frail aunt. “ _Alles in Ordnung?_ ”

“ _Ja, ja. Danke vielmals_.”

“ _Schlaf gut_ ,” Moffitt told him, and left. Arnheiter longed to collapse into the waiting bed, but he knew he couldn’t yet. He stripped off his trousers, took his leg off, and peeled off the cotton sock, damp with perspiration, that covered his stump. After a quick sponge bath, he washed and dried the stump carefully, and put on a fresh sock. _Herr Doktor_ MacNeill had taught him to do this every night without fail; not to do so was to invite pressure sores and blood poisoning.

He was asleep as soon as he pulled the coverlet over himself.

* * *

[1] Sir Robert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart was a senior British diplomat prior to and during the Second World War. “During the war, Vansittart became a prominent advocate of a very anti-German line… reformulated an argument that Germany was intrinsically militaristic and aggressive… They must be thoroughly re-educated under strict Allied supervision for at least a generation. De-Nazification was not enough. In 1943 he wrote: ‘In the opinion of the author, it is an illusion to differentiate between the German right, centre, or left, or the German Catholics or Protestants, or the German workers or capitalists. They are all alike, and the only hope for a peaceful Europe is a crushing and violent military defeat followed by a couple of generations of re-education controlled by the United Nations.’” 

[2] This would be St. Kilda.


	4. Five Chairs at the Table

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Rat Patrol has taken on Corporal Arnheiter, formerly of the Afrika Korps and now a defected POW, as their new radio operator manning the radio at their home base in London. Now the time has come to integrate him into the team-- or has it? There's one more thing that Troy is determined to find out before they make it official.

**Chapter 4**

**Five Chairs at the Table**

Morning brought strange sounds: honking car horns and the rumble of lorries in the street. At least it was not a _Dudelsack_ , Arnheiter reflected wryly, remembering his first morning in a Scottish camp and the weird cacophony of bagpipes sounding reveille. In his half-awake state, the sound of Scotland’s martial instrument had sent him diving for cover, or at least trying to. In time, he had grown used to it, but he had never learned to like it.

He listened as he got himself ready. Were the others awake? Was he the first one? He had to hurry, as he had to be sure that he was dressed and ready before anyone saw him. For some reason that he was unable to explain even to himself, he was troubled by the idea of any of the Patrol seeing him without his leg on. 

“That’s odd,” said Moffitt. “I thought he’d be here directly.” Breakfast was ready and the table set, yet the newest member of the team had not arrived.

“Think he’s all right? Should I go check?” Hitch said aloud.

Pettigrew shook his head. “I heard him getting ready a while ago. He’s probably fine. But I’ll bet you a dollar he thinks he isn’t supposed to eat with us. Or else, we don’t want him to.”

“Could be.” Troy nodded toward the door to the parlor. “Tell him to get himself in here on the double.”

“Right, Sarge.”

A minute later, Tully rapped on the closed door to the new radio room. “ _Kommen Sie herein,”_ Arnheiter said from within. Tully opened the door. Just as he had guessed, the young German was quite ready—dressed, with his hair combed, and seated calmly at the desk. He looked up, a little hesitant. “You are all finished, then?” he asked.

_Yep, I was right._ “Nope, we haven’t started yet, we’re waiting for you. Sarge said to shake it, on the double. _Schnell,”_ Pettigrew added by way of clarification.

“Me? You all wait for me?”

“Yeah, the eggs are gonna get cold, so hustle.”

 _“Donnerwetter!”_ Arnheiter exclaimed in some agitation as he got to his feet, picked up his crutch and followed the man from Kentucky out to the kitchen.

Just as Tully had said, the other three men were ready and waiting. “Please excuse,” Arnheiter said, not meeting anyone’s eyes and red-faced with shame. “I did not know...”

“It’s all right, sit down,” said Troy, firmly but not unkindly. “Notice there are five chairs at the table, not four. You are a member of the team, and we’re not gonna make you eat on the back porch like a stray dog— you got that?”

“Yes,” the radioman answered, still embarrassed. “ _Ich verstehe_.”

“Hey,” said Hitch with a grin as he took the metal cover off the plate keeping the fried eggs warm. There were ten eggs, two for each man. “Hey— We ate with you and the captain that time in the desert, didn’t we?”

“Yes. I will never forget,” Arnheiter began, looked up, and then exclaimed in astonishment, “ _Eier_ —eggs? Real eggs? How is it possible?”

“It’s TOP SECRET,” quipped Moffitt with a sly smile. “Classified.” At Arnheiter’s perplexed expression, the English sergeant relented and explained the apparent magic involved in the existence of non-powdered eggs on their table. “Over there,” he said, gesturing toward the kitchen window, “across the narrow lane lives a middle-aged librarian who has arthritis. She also has two energetic fox terriers, and a chicken house with eight or nine hens. Hitch and Tully worked out a scheme the second week after we arrived. They walk Mrs. Wainwright’s dogs when we are in town, and she brings us a dozen and a half eggs every Sunday as a trade.”

“ _Wunderbar,_ ” said the newest Rat and helped himself to his share, last of all.

The table was cleared after breakfast, and the two junior members of the Patrol made short work of the washing-up duty.

Troy turned to Arnheiter with a serious expression—there was no twinkle in his blue eyes now. “All right,” he said. “Up to now, you have not seen or heard anything that is classified information. Once you have, it will be much harder to change your mind and back out.”

Arnheiter looked back at the American sergeant, sober. “I will not change my mind. If so, I do it before yesterday. Not after six hours of questions.”

“I understand. Still, I’m giving you the chance to reconsider.” Troy turned his wrist to eye his watch. “One hour from now, at 1100, we start your briefing. Until 1100, you can decide to back out, change your mind, turn down the assignment, tell me to go jump in the lake. No harm, no hard feelings, they send you back to where you were and you carry on whatever you were working on there. After 1100—well, it gets a lot harder. I don’t know what MI would decide to do with you to keep that information secure.” _Maybe they would ship him off to that island he talked about… _He got up from the chair. “I’m leaving you here in the kitchen to think it all over, one more time. Understood? _Ist das klar_?” He knew that phrase, at least.

The fair-haired corporal nodded, not taking his eyes from Troy’s face. “Ja. _Alles klar.”_

“Good. We’ll be back in an hour. Hitchcock and Pettigrew are out there in the parlor if you need anything.”

Troy and Moffitt left the house, after explaining to Hitch and Tully what was going on. “Look here, Troy,” said Moffitt with no little consternation, “What’s this about? You saw what those interrogators put him through yesterday in the Cage... why do you think he’d do it now?”

“Because he didn’t know what he was getting into. Because he wanted to be accepted by us. Because he had something to prove. How do I know? All I know is that you, and I, and Major Mac have stuck our necks out on this one, and ... well, I want to be sure he’s not going to suddenly decide he’s not prepared to do the job we picked him for.”

“Why would you think that? You were all for it yesterday.”

They walked about the neighborhood for a time, but neither of them spoke. Finally, as they went into a grassy tree-lined park surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, Troy muttered an oath and ground the butt of his cigarette into the pavement. “I still am… All right. I can’t get it out of my mind. There’s one possibility —just one—that could blow this whole thing up in our faces. And you know it as well as I do. The one thing those interrogators don’t know about.”

Moffitt nodded, slowly, and sighed. He knew, of course. They had seen themselves in the desert the depth of the young corporal’s loyalty to his commander. “Yes... I suppose you could be right. But it’s a moot point. Dietrich’s dead.”

“What if he’s not?”

Alone in the kitchen, seated at the table, Arnheiter did what he had been told, and reconsidered his position. Could he really do this? Could he, a decorated veteran of the _Afrika Korps_ , personally help these men to attack his own country, kill his fellow soldiers, destroy the nation he had once sworn to defend? As Troy had said, they had not yet briefed him on any classified material, but that was about to change. This would be quite a different matter from merely listening to broadcasts and radio transmissions, transcribing them and turning over the information to Military Intelligence. He would be an instrument to be used by the Allies. _I said to Herr Doktor MacNèill that I would do anything in my ability to bring down the Führer and the High Command. Do I mean it? Will I do even this?_

The two sergeants returned to the house on M— Street, and came in the front door. “Well?” asked Troy, as Hitchcock looked up. “Anything?”

“Nope. Just sitting in there writing.”

“We let him finish off the coffee,” Tully added. “Couldn’t hurt, and it’s gotta be better than whatever they got in the camps.”

“Yeah, probably so,” Troy agreed, keeping his misgivings to himself. “Well, let’s see what he has to say.”

He and Moffitt returned to the kitchen, and found Arnheiter exactly as they had left him, sitting at the table with pen and paper. “So,” said Troy as he and Moffitt sat down across the table from him, “what do you say, Corporal? Are you sure you’re in?”

The German nodded. “Yes, Sergeant. I am sure.”

“Good. Glad to hear it.” Troy paused a moment, choosing his words carefully. “But there are a couple of things I need to ask you about. The interrogators didn’t ask you because they don’t know what I know.” His tone had shifted and the friendliness was gone.

“What is that?” Arnheiter felt his hands grow cold with apprehension. He could tell from Troy’s expression that something had gone wrong, but he had no idea what it might be.

“You told me, when I came to discuss this with you in Kent,” the American went on, “that you didn’t know what happened to Dietrich. You sure about that?”

A shadow crossed the younger man’s face for a moment, something very like grief. “That is true. I am not certain, but I think he is dead.”

“Why?” Troy pressed. “What do you know?”

The radioman sighed heavily. “In late February he was wounded very bad. But he lived through the operation and he was sent home to be discharged.”

“How did you get that information? What was your source?”

“I must explain a little. There are four of us, five with Udo, and we are all friends. The senior of us is Wolfgang Bauer—Sergeant Bauer. He is called Wolf, so we call ourself _das Wolfsrudel_ , I don’t know that word in English...”

“The ‘wolf pack,’” supplied Moffitt quietly. “Go on...” _Nice pun, that._

“We arranged it,” Arnheiter went on, “so all of us will write to Konrad’s parents. And they will write the rest of us. After Hauptmann Dietrich was wounded, Wolf Bauer and Rudi Hartmann both told this to Herr and Frau Genscher in letters, and they wrote to my family and my family told me. Konrad cannot write me, I cannot write to him. Prisoners may not to write to each other.”

“So… fourth-hand information by the time it got to you,” Troy said slowly. “What makes you so sure he is dead?”

“Almost I did not survive the long voyage in the hospital ship, and I was only wounded in the legs. He was more seriously wounded than I. Rudi Hartmann said in Africa, they did not think he would live. And no one in the company heard from him after he was sent home. I think he did not survive to reach his home.” By the look in his eyes, it pained him to talk about it. “I believe _Hauptmann_ Dietrich is dead.”

“I see. I’m sorry,” said Troy, and meant it. “But—there’s something I want you to think about, Arnheiter. Think hard. What if he’s not?”

“Then I hope he is well now, and after the war ends someday, I will try to find him.”

“All right. Fair enough. In your place, I’d do the same. But—think about this. Let’s suppose that we—the four of us—are over there across the Channel on a mission…” Troy was fairly sure that Arnheiter would not know the word _hypothetical._

“Yes.”

“And you’re here, listening to the radio traffic, listening for us to contact you. And while you are, you happen to hear another message—from him to someone else. And you realize that he is alive.”

The radioman shook his head, confused. “That is not possible… he would be too ill to serve. If he survived his wounds, he would be discharged permanently.” He explained this to Moffitt, not having enough English to express his meaning.

“If they are desperate enough, they will reactivate men if they have to.” Troy’s expression was grim. “You continue listening, and you find out that he is in command of the sector where we are, and he has heard that there is a group of commandos in the area. You could break in to the transmission and tell him where we are, if you wanted to. What would you do?” _Who are you going to obey? Dietrich, or me?_

Arnheiter stared at him, blue eyes wide, absorbing what Troy was demanding of him. Then he looked down, closing his eyes for a moment.

_That’s what I thought…_ “That’s kind of what I expected—,” the American began, but Moffitt interrupted him with a gesture.

“Let the man speak, Troy,” he said, with a sharp look. “You’ve asked him a question—give him the chance to answer it.”

“All right,” Troy said. “So what would you do?”

Arnheiter raised his face again, and the look in his eyes was agonized. “I would do, Sergeant, what I must do. I will keep the promise I made in the desert.”

Troy nodded, not surprised. “That’s what I thought you would say. Of course, I don’t blame you. But…”

The German shook his head, agitated. “No, Sergeant,” he continued. “You are not understand. Or perhaps you remember not.” _I have not forgotten—why has he?_

“Remember what?”

“‘Strewth,” murmured the Englishman _sotto voce_ as he realized what Arnheiter meant, but Troy paid him no attention for the moment.

“Sergeant, a year ago or a little more, you found us— _der Hauptmann_ and I—in the desert, and I asked you to help us.”

Troy nodded. “I remember.”

“You told me, through him,” he said, nodding towards Moffitt, “that I must to surrender us. And I give my word that if you saved my captain’s life, I will do anything you ask.” He paused. “You saved him, Sergeant. What you ask of me, I will do.” He swallowed hard. “If I promise, I keep it. Now, tomorrow, next year… always.”

Troy stared, dumbfounded. _I thought he meant that day—not forever! _ It had never occurred to him for a moment that the young soldier had meant that promise to be in effect for all time. Slowly, he nodded, accepting it. “I’m sorry for being so hard on you. But—I had to know what you would do.”

The former company clerk nodded, acknowledging the necessity. “Yes, Sergeant. I understand.”

“No hard feelings, I hope.” Troy said. Arnheiter frowned, not understanding the idiom.

Moffitt translated hastily, “ _Er hofft, daß Sie nicht mit ihm böse sei.”_

“No, it is... okay?” He accepted the handshake Troy offered him. “I said it right?” English was one thing; American English was quite another matter, as he had already discovered in less than a day with the Rat Patrol.

Troy grinned. “Yeah, you said it right. Let’s get to work.”


	5. Cover Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now that the defected POW, Friedrich Arnheiter, has been attached to the Rat Patrol's home base in a London suburb, it's time to get him integrated into the team and their mission. Strangely, his first duty is to fabricate a story about something that never happened.

Troy and Moffitt went with Arnheiter into the ‘briefing room’ as they called it, which had once been a formal dining room and still contained a massive mahogany dining table. The table was covered with papers and files. Once they sat down, Troy handed a sheet of paper to Arnheiter, saying, “This is going to be your first assignment, to learn that story. It’s your cover story. You need to learn it so well that I could wake you up at three in the morning and you could tell it to me.”

Arnheiter looked at the page of typescript and frowned. He understood what Troy had said, or thought he had, but it didn’t help much. “I don’t understand. Why a story?”

“I guess they didn’t tell you. See, you know, and we know, and M.I. knows that you are a POW, but these people,” Troy said, gesturing to include the surrounding houses in the square, “don’t know that. And we don’t want them to know that. If our neighbors get the idea that we have a German soldier working and living here with us, there might be trouble.”

Arnheiter sipped at his coffee. “So, they think I am... what?”

“Before you came,” Moffitt explained, “Major MacDonald and Captain Langhenry went about all the houses surrounding us with your picture, and explained to the neighbors that you were a German defector and a refugee, and you were on our side, as it were. And that you would be here to help us because none of us is a native German speaker. All of this is the truth, so far as it goes.”

Troy then picked up the explanation and went on. “For the time you are working with us, you will be wearing civilian clothes, or parts of British kit. We can’t have anyone see you wearing your own uniform items, if you understand. If they suspect you’re not a civilian, things could get ugly, fast.”

“ _Ja_ , I understand.”

Troy went on. “So, the boys at MI have created a cover story for you. Here goes. You’re... twenty-three, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, so— in short, here’s how it goes. You were twenty, and the Hitler Youth brought you and a big group of others up to a big rally in Hamburg. You didn’t want to be there because you and your family are all dissidents, but you didn’t really have a choice. With all the crowds of people, you saw the opportunity to get out. After dark, you slipped out through town and ran away. You stole a bike and made it to the docks. You stowed away on a ship to Sweden, and then stowed away in the cargo hold of another ship headed to Britain. While you were hiding below in the cargo hold, some of the cargo shifted, and your leg was crushed. The British authorities at the port found you among the cargo and rescued you. But the surgeons couldn’t save your leg.”

Arnheiter nodded, slowly absorbing the idea. “Why I ran away?” His expression was thoughtful. “Over there, we boys in the HJ are like heroes. They call us “the bright future of Germany”, the leaders of tomorrow. What makes me run away?”

“Tell the truth,” said Troy. “What you said yesterday to the brass... you and your family are good Lutherans, and they were forcing you to do things you know aren't right. And you can say they were forcing you to use your art to paint propaganda posters for the Nazis.” _The more truth you can tell, the better._

“Yes. That is the truth. Who hears this story? Who must I tell this to?”

“If we’re lucky,” replied Moffitt, “no one. But if someone asks you why you are here, or what happened to your leg, this is what you have to tell them.”

“So your job for the next couple of days is to learn your lines,” Troy went on, with a slight chuckle. “Tell the story to yourself, to the mirror, to Mrs. Wainwright’s cat, any way you have to. But if you ever do have to tell it to someone, it has to sound like it really happened to you. Make it good, kid.”

“There is one small thing, or two,” Arnheiter said suddenly, looking sheepish. He turned up the right sleeve of his shirt above his elbow to reveal a small tattoo of the _Afrika Korps_ palm tree on his upper arm, as well as a large scar from a bullet wound. “Only a soldier has these…”

“I thought you weren’t allowed to have tattoos,” said Moffitt, with a chuckle.

“We are not...but Konrad and I were on leave. Hauptmann Dietrich was dining with a lady, the supply lieutenant in Derna, and we were at liberty.”

“I’m not worried about that tattoo,” said Troy. “Nobody in the neighborhood is going to see you without your shirt on. But the cover story is for anybody who wonders what you’re doing here and who you are. The fact remains you still are a POW—you are restricted to the house and backyard—back garden,” he corrected himself, “and you may not leave the house without a guard. That is, one of us armed. The story on that is that we are protecting you from people who might think you’re an escaped prisoner or a spy.”

“Some things here are not right,” Arnheiter said, frowning as he read the script of his cover story. “The writer does not know. The HJ is only until we are eighteen, not older. Then for six months we do labor service, _Arbeitsdienst_. But no man in Deutschland is twenty years old and not a soldier.”

“Except government workers, essential personnel, and university students,” Moffitt replied thoughtfully. “Could you have been a student?”

The young German shook his head firmly. “No. I went to a _Realschule._ The university is for men who went to a _Gymnasium,_ like Hauptmann Dietrich or yourself. Not for _Realschüler_ like me.”

“I would not worry about that overmuch,” the Englishman replied. “No one wants to see your _curriculum vitae_ , after all. The average person in England does not know how the German education system works, and they don’t need to know how old you are. You could say, “a year ago,” and take it from there.”

Troy nodded. “Anyway, that’s for starters. There is a lot more that you need to be briefed on.”

Three hours later, their initial briefing came to an end. “ _Alles klar_?” Moffitt asked, having translated everything in both directions all afternoon.

“Ja,” said the newest Rat, “I think so.”

“Good. Time for tea, I think.”

Troy got up from the mahogany table, now covered in maps and paperwork, and opened the door to the dining room, which signaled to the other two Rats that they could come in.

“Guess you’re one of us now, right?.” Hitch grinned and pulled up a chair across from Arnheiter. “So what do we call you? I mean, what do you want us to call you?”

“We’re not much on formality,” Tully agreed. “And you need a code name, or a callsign or something, too.”

“We haven’t even gotten to that yet.” Troy chuckled as he gathered up the papers that were on the table and stacked them neatly back into the steel file box he had taken them out of.

“ _Mein Name...”_ Arnheiter began, and then started over _. “_ My name is Friedrich,” he said, slowly. “My friends call me ‘Fritz.’ You can say that too, it is okay for me. It is short.” He accepted the chipped blue mug of tea that Moffitt handed him. “ _Danke sehr._ What code name you want for me?”

“Well, we started using names from Robin Hood back in the desert, because of that Errol Flynn movie a few years ago. And it kind of fits, in a strange way,” Hitch explained. “Sarge is Robin Hood, naturally—so his callsign is RH, and Moffitt here is Little John—LJ—which really fits because his name is John, well, Jack. Tully is Friar Tuck, FT, because it starts with T, and I use Will Scarlett, WS, because of the red képi. With me so far?”

Arnheiter shook his head. “No.” Then he shrugged.

After the midafternoon tea break, the four Rats left Arnheiter alone in the briefing room to work on creating the story he would have to tell about why he was there and how he had come to be in England though not a POW. _I think I do not understand this_ , he mused. _There are prisoners doing farm work in Britain everywhere. And I do not like to tell lies, as Hauptmann Dietrich instructed me. Always tell as much of the truth as you can, he said._

Still, it couldn't be helped. For reasons he did not fully grasp, he needed to tell people a story they would believe about what he was doing here and why _. If it were a true story-- if I had never gone to the Army, never been in Afrika, how would I have gotten away? How would I have escaped from a strange city, among a thousand HJ boys like me? And why? What would make me risk being shot in order to run away? And risk die Familie's lives too?_ But sitting in the chair thinking was not getting him anywhere.

He got up from the chair, using one crutch, and moved to the window to look out onto the street. _Hamburg is a big old city, older than London, I think. Old cities have many narrow lanes and hidden streets..._ An idea began to come to him, or rather a picture, a series of images. He could almost see the actions taking place, like watching an adventure film in the _Kino_ as a boy.

He hobbled back to the table, seized paper and the pen left there, and began to draw—at first slowly, and then faster as the story unfolded in his imagination, and he raced to keep up.

Anyone else in the room would have heard noises and thumping as heavy furniture was being moved, but he heard nothing.

After an hour or so, Troy had heard absolutely nothing, not a sound, emanating from the formal dining room, and very quietly pushed the door ajar to see if perhaps Arnheiter had fallen asleep. _After what the brass put him through yesterday, I wouldn't be surprised,_ the American sergeant said to himself. He looked, and looked again, and silently closed the door again.

"Well?" Moffitt asked, amused. "What's he up to?"

"Beats me," said Troy, his dark brows furrowed. "He's just drawing. And drawing. And drawing some more. Didn't even hear me open the door."

The Englishman chuckled, being fairly sure that was exactly what the newest Rat was occupied with. "Well, Troy, you asked an artist to tell a story—what do you suppose he's doing?" He shook his head, amused, and slipped into the dining room to supply the young German with more coffee, more paper, and a fresh bottle of ink.

_Arnheiter had been thinking in the back of his mind, all the way on the train to Hamburg for the rally, how he was going to disappear. He had to vanish, run away, get out of the country, or die— any way he could. Like a cornered rat, he had run out of options, but this journey to the northern coast of Germany was the best opportunity he would ever have. Remaining in his town, he would be forced to participate in actions with his Hitler-Jugend group he knew were wrong, and a grave sin, and he was determined not to take part in them. Yet, at the same time, he could neither rebel nor refuse, for the sake of his family, who would surely suffer for his rebellion against the local Party officials. Worse, the pastor of their church could not help him—he himself was under constant observation, with a silent hard-faced man seated in the back of the church every Sunday, who was certainly not there to worship God._

_He had managed to avoid a number of occasions when the gang of boys attacked businesses or people in the towns of Ilmenau, Erfurt, or in the city of Jena, by pretending to be so involved in painting a new propaganda poster or other art approved by the Party leaders that he could not be interrupted to do something else. But that ruse would only work for so long—it wouldn't be possible to spend the rest of his natural life in the throes of artistic inspiration for the Party's cause. Moreover, he was being pressured to get his sweetheart Lieselotte with child before he himself would go to enlist in the Army in a few months. She was being equally persuaded to lie with him, and bear more handsome fair-haired sons for their country. He loved Lilo, and if they were to have children, he was determined that they would not be brought up in some government-run nursery, but be reared by their own parents and relations._

_So, for the sake of his soul he couldn't cooperate, and for the sake of his family he couldn't rebel. His only choices were death, or exile. In this old city, the second largest in the nation, with its many narrow streets, there had to be a way to vanish altogether._

_That afternoon, after the rallies and speeches had ended for the day, the chance abruptly fell into his lap. "Hoi, Arnheiter," called Bruno, one of the other young men who had traveled up to the North in the same railway carriage as he had, "Come with Kurt and me, we're going to get leave to go see the waterfront and the ocean. we'll never get another chance like this one... and there’s the Reeperbahn too," he added, with a mischievous grin. "Let's see if the red-light girls are all they're rumored to be."_

_The sea! That was it-- that was how to run away and never return. He could maybe beg passage on a ship, it didn't matter where to. "Ja, that's good -- let's see if they'll give us a few hours’ liberty." There was no need for him to feign enthusiasm._

_As it happened, they didn't even have to ask. The designated group leader for the seventy-eight boys from Hesse and Thüringen gave them all three hours’ liberty to do whatever they liked before reporting back for the evening roll call. That wasn't so good, Arnheiter reflected, with no little annoyance. Having nearly a hundred comrades of the HJ spread out all over this part of Hamburg meant that anywhere he went, he might be seen—it would be thus much more difficult than disappearing from a group of four._

_The four youths agreed that listening to hours of speeches in the sun was thirsty work, and therefore finding themselves sufficient quantities of beer was the first order of business. Having satisfied their thirst, they set off for the harbor and the waterfront. It wouldn't be difficult to find-- the deep sound of great ships' whistles could be heard for long distances. They walked through the streets in an amiable group, and Arnheiter regretted for a moment that he would not see them again... they were almost the sort of men whom he might one day regard as friends. "Wait for me a moment," he said abruptly, holding up his uncle’s small camera in its brown leather case. "I want to go back a street or two and get a few photos of that church with the double tower."_

_Bruno scoffed. "Whatever for? You know there's no God, it's just a story to comfort old women."_

_"Ja," Arnheiter answered with a chuckle, "Old women like my Oma. She loves that kind of thing, old bridges and towers and such. And I am studying drafting, so I always take a lot of photos of buildings. I'll be back in a moment, so go on and I'll catch you up in a minute or two."_

_"Well, all right," Werner agreed. "But don't tarry long, Junge, or you'll get lost in this warren of streets."_

_That's the idea, thought Arnheiter, doubling back towards the church he had spotted in passing._

_None of the others ever saw him again._

_An hour later, unfortunately, it had happened exactly as Werner had predicted— he was completely lost. His home town, Ilmenau, was much smaller and was easy to find one’s way around in. But he had walked, he was certain, up one street and down another and around in circles. Having taken the photos he wanted, Arnheiter had removed the roll of film from the camera and tucked it carefully in an inner pocket, and smashed the camera itself to the pavement. ‘I’m sorry, Onkel Helmut…’ he thought. In addition, to confuse the trail further, he had slashed a cut on his forearm with his pocket knife, smeared the blood on his cap, and abandoned that in the street a few hundred yards from where he’d left the camera._

_Now he had taken refuge two floors up, in a semi-enclosed outdoor stairwell of an apartment block. It was open to the air, but the roof partly kept the steps from being covered in ice and snow half the year. He leaned against the bricks and considered what to do next. He still knew which direction the harbor was, but had no idea which street would take him there without his being spotted by his erstwhile comrades. He peered around the edge of the wall, and saw no one in the same HJ uniform as he had._

_“Psst!” Arnheiter nearly jumped out of his own shoes at the sudden sound of a child’s voice. “Psst! Versteckst du hier? Spiele ich mit?”_

_Ach, du lieber Gott… He held a finger to his lips as a little girl with curly brown hair peered out of a window, eager to join in this interesting game. “Shhh…” he said softly._

_“Wie? Anna, was machst du denn?” A woman’s voice came from the interior of the flat._

_“Mama,” said the little one, “A funny man is here in the stairs, playing hide and go seek. Can I play too?”_

_“What do you mean? Who’s out there?” The window was opened all the way, and Arnheiter found himself facing a woman in her mid-thirties, looking him up and down with an expression of bewilderment._

_A moment later, before he had time to do anything, the woman opened the door and stepped out, her eyes flashing with annoyance and, he realized suddenly, not a little fear. “What are you doing there?” she demanded, looking him up and down. She took in his Hitler-Jugend uniform, the bloodstained sleeve, and his missing cap, and her expression changed to one of bafflement. “Are you hiding, as Marta said?”_

_There was nothing Arnheiter could do now but tell the truth. He had not reckoned with encountering anyone in his escape attempt, but had envisioned himself just quietly disappearing from the crowded city never to be seen again. “Ja, das stimmt,” he said, keeping an eye toward the street below and watching for any others in the same uniform. “Please say nothing, ma’am...”_

_She stared at him in surprise and wonder. “Wirklich? You are running away? From... from the others?” she asked in a whisper. Then she pointed to a group of young men walking along the street below in the characteristic brown shirts and black shorts. “From them?” Wordlessly, he nodded. The woman stepped back into the flat and gestured him to follow her in. “Quickly, in here.”_

_He stepped in, and gave a reassuring smile to the little girl before turning back to her mother. “Can you tell me how to reach the harbor from here? I have taken many wrong streets trying to get there. I don’t know now where I am,” he confessed, embarrassed. Out of doors, in the countryside, his map-and-compass ability was quite good, but in this large and complex city, it hadn’t helped much._

_The girl’s mother had gone into another room, and now returned to the main room, carrying a blue knitted pullover and a cloth cap of the sort popular with bicyclists. “Here, take these,” she said. “They are my brother’s, but he is in the Army now. He will not care about some old clothes. And you will not look like a HJ boy who’s lost his cap.” She picked up paper and a pen from the sideboard and hastily sketched a map that would get him there. “Where will you go?” _

_“It doesn’t matter,” he said frankly. “Anywhere.”_

_“Go, then, and God watch over you. Don’t thank me, Junge, just get out of here before you’re seen. If you take the other stair down, you will be in a small garden. The bicycle that is there is also my brother’s. Take it and go. Leave it at the harbor, and I will come there soon to find it.”_

_The little girl, Marta, seemed to realize that the nice man in the stairs was leaving at once, and her eyes filled with tears. “Don’t go! I want to play the hiding game!” she wailed as Arnheiter hastily put on the sweater and the soft cap._

_“Yes, I know,” he said calmly. “This game isn’t for little ones like you, it’s too dangerous. But you can help me if you wish. Can you stay inside now for a while, and don’t tell anyone you saw me? That will help me win the game...”_

_A few minutes later, he was pedaling through the narrow streets for all he was worth, headed for the harbor where the ships unloaded their cargoes from around the world, all hours of the day and night...._

<<<<<>>>>>

Arnheiter continued thinking, and sketching, with no awareness of how long he had worked or what time it was, until there came a knock on the door that startled him out of his reverie.

Hitch’s voice called from outside the door, “Hey, are you all right? Dinner’s on.”

Dinner? _Das Abendessen?_ Arnheiter peered at his watch, and then became aware that, while certainly not yet dark outside, that the sun was much lower in the sky, according to the angle of sunlight through the windows. “O.K., I come now,” he said, embarrassed for the second time that day by arriving late to the table.

It was not, however, as bad as that. When he came into the kitchen a few minutes later, the others were just sitting down. He hoped they hadn’t been waiting long. He began to apologize, but Troy waved it away. “That’s why Hitch went to get you— I figured you were involved in your work.” He gave the newest Rat a warm smile. “How’s it going? Getting it worked out?”

Arnheiter nodded, feeling relieved that no one seemed to be annoyed or angry with him. It would take a while, he knew, for him to learn to work with them in this highly irregular situation. He paused a minute to collect his thoughts before answering. “Yes,” he said. “I think it will be good enough. But there are some things hard to make clear. A person from another place cannot understand, I think.”

“Don’t worry too much about that,” the American sergeant replied. “We can iron out the details later.”

Arnheiter started to take a drink of his tea, and then stopped short, frowning. “Iron... out? _Eisen, aus... wie, bitte?”_ He shook his head in confusion.

“Uh-oh, Sarge, you threw him a curve ball,” Tully said, grinning. He pantomimed the motion of ironing, and added, “It means to take out problems. Make it nice and smooth, like a shirt.”

“Oh! _Ausbügeln_ , we say. Means the same.”

Hitch started to laugh. “That sounds like a cuss word... ausbuggel? Say it again, would you?”

Far from being offended, the young German chuckled too, equally amused. _“Ausbügeln,”_ he repeated. “We use a _Bügeleisen_ to make the shirt smooth. Other things, too.”

Moffitt had not participated in the vocabulary discussion because he had been occupied at this stove, it being his day as cook. Now he came to the table with their supper, not Army rations but a typically English wartime repast. “Bangers and mash tonight, fellows,” he announced. He placed a platter of the browned sausages called ‘bangers’, and two bowls. The larger bowl held reconstituted mashed potatoes, and the smaller one contained reheated tinned mushy peas.

 _“Ach, heiße Würstchen_!” exclaimed Arnheiter, pleased. “ _Das ist toll!”_

“ _Leider, nicht,”_ the Englishman said ruefully. “Not nearly as good as your _Würstchen_ , I regret to say. The meat has been stretched with farina. They are edible, though to what degree is a matter of debate,” he said with a wry face, and then repeated his statement in German. “Also, at the moment we have no fresh potatoes. Those should come in a day or so, with additional supplies.”

But apparently Moffitt need not have apologized for the provender—Arnheiter devoured his share with every evidence of enjoyment, as did the others.

After they had eaten and squared away the kitchen, Arnheiter rehung the dishtowel on its hook and pushed in the chairs. He was about to return to the briefing room to continue working, but Troy shook his head. “Nope,” he said firmly. “Off duty. You can do anything you want. Read, listen to the radio, whatever you want. It’s up to you.”

“Before you do that, you should go and see your room now,” Moffitt said as he indicated the door to the former study. “Tully and Hitch were working on it most of the afternoon while you were in the briefing room.”

Mystified, and wondering what strange things had occurred in his absence, the fair-haired corporal moved to the door and opened it. “ _Himmel_!” he exclaimed in surprise. Since that morning, the bed had been pushed to one side of the room. The space nearest the door was now occupied by a large and heavy desk, which held an impressive array of electronic equipment. Side by side in the center were the radio transmitter and receiver, flanked by an oscilloscope on one side and a vacuum tube rack on the other side. In front of those lay two different styles of telegraph key and a coil of copper wire, along with a box containing an electric soldering outfit. “ _Prima_ ,” he added, surveying the assorted communications equipment. In front of the desk was a standard office swivel chair on casters.

Hitch grinned. “Yeah, this is the fun part,” he said. “You and I get to set up all this stuff, and start working on our system.” He saw Arnheiter’s gaze light on some other things that had been moved into the room that afternoon. “Oh, yeah, Sergeant Morison came by with that, too. Doc Carey sent him with it,” he explained, looking toward the shiny new military-issue wheelchair in the corner. “He said you need it sometimes.”

 _“Ja, das stimmt,”_ Arnheiter agreed. “Sixteen hours a day is too long to wear this.” He tapped on the socket of his artificial leg. “And _die Krücken_ make one tired.” He had been using crutches for the last couple of days after it was time to remove the prosthesis, but it was good to have the chair now as well. The one he had been using before had not arrived with him due to the awkwardness of bringing it on the train.

“Quite so,” said Moffitt with feeling. “Bloody nuisance, they are.” He had good reason to know it.

“Everything okay with you?” Troy asked, as he came into the room as well. “If you need us to change something, just say so.”

Arnheiter turned back to him. “Yes, all is okay. It is very good.”

“Great. Then it’s time to stand down. You’re free till 0800 tomorrow.”

“What do you want to do?” Tully asked as they returned to the sitting room and he began to set up the card table. “We generally play cards or something like that. What games do you like to play? Cards, checkers, dominoes...?”

Arnheiter’s face lit up, despite how tired he was, and he smiled with pleasure. _“Es ist mir egal_...I like to play anything.”

Troy chuckled at the young German’s enthusiasm. “One thing about that,” he said. “Because of the nature of what we do, if you want to play cards, fine. Play any game you want— but not for money. If you want to play for matchsticks, gumdrops, or paperclips, go right ahead, but we don’t gamble among ourselves. That’s my rule. We depend on each other for our lives, and we can’t have anybody getting his nose out of joint over who owes who money, or anything like that. Same goes for you too, as part of the patrol. Got that?”

“ _Ja_ , got it.”

Hitch had been thinking. “Sarge, how about Rummy? We can all play.” Rummy was one of the few card games besides poker that was playable by more than four players. “We just need to use two decks.”

“That seems like a jolly idea,” said Moffitt. “While you are setting things up, I shall see about procuring some appropriate libations— a half dozen?”

By the time the Englishman returned, the others had decided to set up the kitchen table for cards instead; there was more room for five chairs, especially as Arnheiter had changed to using the wheelchair for the rest of the evening. “Oh, glad you’re back,” said Tully with gratitude as the English sergeant came into the kitchen with the bottles of beer. “We need a little translation help here— the phrase book doesn’t have the right words for explaining card games. And the folks whose house this is don’t have a copy of Hoyle around, either.”


	6. Duty Rosters and Language Lessons

_“_ What happened then?” asked Sergeant Moffitt, intrigued. 

Arnheiter looked around at the group of men gathered in the sitting room of the Wimbledon house. All four of the Rat Patrol were there, along with Major MacDonald and one other man whom he did not know. This visitor had light brown hair and brown eyes, and seemed to be amiable enough. When they came, MacDonald had inquired about how things were proceeding, and Troy had told the major about their work in briefing Arnheiter and setting up the radio equipment in the former study. They had all gathered in the sitting room, and then the other man had asked in a friendly manner, “So, I hear you’re going to be helping these fellows for the duration, eh?”

“Yes, sir,” Arnheiter had replied, not quite sure what was going on. 

“Splendid. They say you’re first-rate. So how do you come to be here, young fellow?”

Then Arnheiter had understood. It was a test. No one had said that, but he knew. He had glanced quickly at Troy, who had nodded slightly. 

Now he continued with telling his story, which he had composed a couple of days before. “The map she gave me was very good. I found the waterfront,” he explained, “and the shipping. I left the bicycle and tied it to a ... to _eine Laterne_. And I put a note on it for her.”

“You left a note?” Troy was surprised. “What did it say?”

“Not much.” The young German smiled briefly. “I wrote it on a small piece of the map. I said, ‘Thank you— the boy from Jena.’ I had to say something. She helped me.” He took a drink from his mug of builder's tea before going on. “But then I had much trouble.”

MacDonald nodded, “I would think so. It can’t have been easy. What kind of trouble?”

“I didn’t think about it before, but in Hamburg people do not speak the same way. They speak _Plattdeutsch_ , and I do not. I heard people talking all around me, and I understood nothing— not any word. I was truly in another country.” That experience, at least, was almost the truth. 

“What did you do?” Troy asked, impressed at the details that the radioman had incorporated into the story. 

“I walked up and down, and I looked for men loading ships. I found one ship with men working. I offered to help them, and they laughed. But they let me help a little, and threw me a few coins. Then the captain came up from below and shouted to me, I think he asked ‘Who are you and what you want?’ I said, I want a job, to work passage to go with them. He told me to come up to the cabin and speak with him. I went to see him. Then he spoke to me, in school German— _Hochdeutsch_ — and I told him I was from Jena, and he asked why I was so far in the north. I told him I came to the rally in Hamburg only so I could run away. The captain laughed at me.”

“He did? Why?”

Arnheiter looked sheepish. “He said running away from home is for naughty children, not a grown man out of school. Then I told him why, and the truth was that I was in a fight with a man, about my girlfriend, and people said he might die. I did not mean to kill him, but I think the authorities will not believe me. He thought a while and said they would leave that night for Sweden. He will take me if I will work, but if the police come and look for me, he will have to tell them where I went. I agreed. I said Sweden, Spain, the South Sea—I will go anywhere.”

The brown-haired Englishman spoke up. “What did you do then?”

“In two days we were in Goteborg, and he left me there. He said from Goteborg I could find another ship, but I would be safe in Sweden. He was a kind man, he gave me food and a little money when we reached the port. I had also money my uncle gave me.”

“How long were you in Goteborg?” MacDonald asked. 

“Two days, three nights.” The fair-haired corporal smiled. “It was almost a little holiday at first. I could do and say what I want, like a free man. But I stayed by the harbor, and I watched ships come and go, and I waited. After two days, an English ship came to the harbor. That is what I wanted, it is only three days away. I can go that long with no food, but not twelve days to America.”

“I am surprised they took you on board,” said the brown-haired man said, “as you spoke no English.”

“They did not take me, and I did not ask. The third night there in the port, the crew were not so careful as before, and I was able to get in after them. They had some drink and they did not hear me follow them below in the dark.” He finished what was left of his tea. “There is not much to tell. I hid in the under place...”

“Belowdecks,” supplied Moffitt as Arnheiter fumbled for the right terms. “In the cargo hold.”

“Yes, in the cargo. On the second day, there was a storm in the North Sea. I was afraid, there was no light, and I tried to climb up the ladder to above. I do not care if they see me. But I fell from the ladder, and something very heavy fell on my legs. Many hours later— I don’t know how long— some sailors came down to the cargo and found me there trapped, my legs broken.”

“‘Strewth,” murmured the brown-haired man. “It must have been dreadfully painful all that time.”

“I do not remember,” the German answered frankly. “When we came to land again, they took me to hospital. The city was Aberdeen. The doctors took good care of me, but one leg healed and the other did not. They took it off so I don’t die.” He shrugged. “The authorities had _keine Ahnung_ , no idea, what to do with me. I was not a student, and not a soldier, but I was in the _Hitler-Jugend_ , so they decided I was a prisoner of war. I was all winter and part of spring in the prisoners camp in Dalcorrie in west Scotland. _Der Herr Doktor_ MacNèill helped me walk, helped me with the new leg, and took me walking hills with him.” He looked a little melancholy at the recollection. “Then the Red Cross came and saw the camp. They said I was not captured in battle, so I was not a prisoner of war. Instead, I was a refugee, a civilian, and they moved me to the internment camp on the Island of Man. Other Germans were there, and Italians and some others, who were in Britain when the war began. From there I began to think a long time about how to fight against Berlin. And there are not many things that I can do. But I can do something, so I am here.” He stopped then, and turned to face Troy. “I pass the test, Sergeant?”

Troy grinned. “And then some. Hell, you had me believing it, and I know what really happened.”

Pettigrew drawled, “Oughta buy that man a beer, Sarge. Think he’s earned it, what with working on that and helping Hitch and me string about forty miles of copper wire in the last couple of days.”

The man with the light brown hair got to his feet and came over to shake Arnheiter’s hand warmly. “Troy here is right,” he said in a pleasant English accent. “It’s quite well done, on the whole. A few bits might need a change here and there, but small things really. And with any luck, you’ll never need to tell that whole yarn again— or any of it, perhaps. Still, you’ll need to know it by heart just as if it really were the truth. At any rate, Corporal, you’ll be seeing rather a lot of me, I daresay. My name’s Carey, John Carey, and now that you’re part of this unholy crew, I’m your doctor. Theirs too, of course.” 

Arnheiter nodded. He had suspected that for some time. “I thought you are a doctor.” He grinned now, himself, and tapped the middle of his chest, indicating the location of the stethoscope he could see concealed under the doctor’s V-neck pullover.

“Yes, and I will be back here tomorrow at 0900 for your physical.”

After Carey and MacDonald had left, the five enlisted men gathered in the kitchen to manage their own dinner. “Eventually,” said Troy, “your own ration book and paperwork should get transferred to MI, but we can improvise until then. The food situation here is kind of unusual,” he went on. “Hitch and Tully and I get our supplies and ‘garrison rations’ from the U.S. Army Air Corps base not too far from here. Moffitt gets supplied by the British Army, and you do too as a POW.”

“We also have to slot you into the duty roster,” added Moffitt, bending to light the cooker. “Duties get rotated weekly so no one gets the same job over and over. How are you at general cookery, by the way?” He handed over a half-dozen potatoes and the peeler to their newest comrade.

Arnheiter accepted the task amiably and began deftly peeling. “ _Ja_ , I can cook. I worked in the kitchens and the gardens after the tailor’s hut ... _wurde verbrannt_ ,” he said, fumbling for the right words.

The English sergeant turned back to him with a puzzled expression, frowning. “ _Verbrannt_? It was set on fire? Someone burned it?”

“Huh? Wait a minute—you can’t burn up a Nissen hut, it’s steel,” said Hitchcock, equally confused.

Arnheiter nodded, looking back at them. “Is true. They burned a big fire, inside the hut.”

“Why the devil would anyone set fire to the tailor’s shop?” The English sergeant was puzzled.

With a sigh, the young German replied, “Because I was inside. Alone.” The other men had seen and lived through much in two years of guerrilla-style warfare, but all of them fell silent at the thought of anyone planning to burn a man alive who was unable to get out. 

Troy regarded him with a mixture of sympathy and approval. He almost wanted to put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder, but he didn’t. “You wouldn’t knuckle under to the camp Nazis.”

“No.” Arnheiter shrugged and resumed peeling potatoes. “When I was young, I was afraid. I did what they want. Not now. The worst things happened already to me. What else can they do?”

“What happened?” Hitch was curious. “How’d you get out?”

Arnheiter put the last potato into the bowl and set down the peeler. “Hot air is up, cool air is down. I go on the floor and push the door open.” That wasn’t the whole story, but he didn’t want to go into more detail.

Changing the subject, Tully spoke up. “You said you worked in the gardens, too?”

“ _Ja._ I know about that. I like that work, to be outside in air.” Arnheiter took his own share of the food and went on. “Why?”

“Because we got the Victory garden started after we got here,” Hitch explained, “but we haven’t had much time to work on it. If you are good at that, it would be great. You’re probably better at it than me, anyway—I’m a city boy.”

“What city? America is a big country. From where you all come?”

Troy indicated himself, Hitch, and Tully. “Michigan, New York, Kentucky…. What we need here is a globe, or an atlas.”

“There’s an atlas in the library,” Moffitt added. “And I’m a Londoner myself, so I’m at home, unlike the rest of you lot,” he joked. “We can peruse the atlas after dinner, if you like. Where are you from?”

“Thüringen,” the fair-haired corporal replied. “I was born in Jena. My mother was died when I was four, when my sister born. My father stayed in Jena to work, but he took me to _Onkel_ Helmut and _Tante_ Trudi in Ilmenau, with my Oma there too.”

“That’s your dad’s brother?” Troy asked.

“ _Ja_. He is older than Papa. They have no _Kinder_ , only me. So I help them with all things. The house, the garden, the kitchen.”

“Makes sense.”

Hitch had been thinking and spoke up. “Sarge, what about drill? Does he drill with us?”

“Far as I know.” He turned to Arnheiter. “What do you say? Did they have you on drill, on PT, in the camp?”

Arnheiter didn’t know the expression P.T., but he had learned _drillen_ meant the same thing in both languages. “At first, no. Later, yes. I cannot run, but other things I can do.”

“You’ve been out of the camp… about a month, right?” The German nodded. “So, Hitch and Tully can show you what they’ve got set up down there,” Troy explained, gesturing toward the stairs while Moffitt gathered up the dishes from the table and Pettigrew commenced the washing-up. “We got hold of some equipment from the American air base—bars and weights and so on.”

“Yeah,” said Hitch with a grin. “We might be living in a fancy house in Wimbledon, but it’s still the Army. Reveille at 0600, PT at 0630, breakfast at 0730, on duty at 0800.”

“What is your duty now?” Arnheiter asked, puzzled. “When you are here?” He finished wiping down the pine table with the damp towel.

“Right now, our duty is integrating you into the team,” said Troy. “See, the last couple months we haven’t had our own radio operator back here in London—our radio traffic was all going through MI with all the other signals. That wasn’t working so well—some of our messages got delayed or didn’t come through, so we requested our own radio contact, on a different frequency. And we asked for it to be a German, like I told you. We saw your dossier, and that you had already had comm and signals training, and here you are. But now we need to get up to speed again in a hurry—get the transceiver set up, the codes arranged, everything. They want us back out there in a week, ten days at the most.”

Arnheiter absorbed that, and his responsibility in making that possible. “I will be ready.”

The next morning, Arnheiter was already awake and had gotten up when the brass bell in the kitchen was rung as the “reveille” signal. As the first item of the day was physical training, he did not dress fully, but put on his prosthesis, a clean undershirt, and the khaki shorts he had been issued in the POW camp for the purpose of summer exercise drill. Yanking a comb through his blond hair, he picked up one crutch and began to make his way down the stairs to the room they had showed him on the second day he had been there.

He was halfway down the steps, carefully taking one step at a time, putting the artificial foot on each step first, followed by his left foot, when Hitch came out of the room that he and Tully shared. “Morning,” said the young American, suddenly unsure what to say.

Arnheiter nodded in greeting, but he didn’t answer as he was concentrating on negotiating the stairs. “Yes, good morning,” he replied a few moments later. “Where now?”

“In here, right this way.” Hitchcock grinned and indicated the open door of one of the rooms, presumably part of the original “downstairs” servants’ quarters when the house was built in the 1890s. Arnheiter followed him and surveyed the room once he entered. The furniture had all been removed, and the carpeted floor was bare except for training equipment, which included three pairs of dumbbell weights, one barbell with a set of varied weight plates, two padded canvas mats, a punching bag suspended from the ceiling, and a chin bar bolted into a doorway. Tully was already there, in the middle of a set of push-ups—he looked up briefly, and then resumed counting his repetitions.

The German nodded in approval, approached the chin bar, and then began to laugh. “ _Ach, das ist komisch_ ,” he exclaimed and then remembered to use English. “It is funny,” he said, still chuckling. “Never before am I the smallest man.” He demonstrated his meaning by showing that the chin bar was set almost too high for him to reach—he could touch it but not grasp it. “All of you are more tall than I.”

“Oh, sorry…” Hitch apologized. “We can make that one moveable if you want.” He looked around for something the other man could stand on, but he didn’t see anything of a useful height. “Do you want me to boost you?”

“Boost? I know not this word, boost.”

“I’ll show you. Like this—” Hitch laced his fingers into a step and bent down. “You step in my hands, like you’re getting on a horse. Will that work?”

“We will try…” Arnheiter paused a moment, thinking, then changed position so he could step up with his left foot. Hitch boosted him the two or three inches needed until the German could grab the bar with both hands, palms facing in. “ _Ja, das ist gut_ ,” he said.

“Want me to count for you?”

“O.K.” He had already discovered, in this patrol with three Americans, that the word “O.K.” was almost always appropriate in any situation.

“Right, go for ten…. One — two— three— four— five—six—seven—eight—nine—ten— stop,” Hitch said, but Arnheiter chinned himself on the bar once more. “Well, okay, eleven.”

Arnheiter carefully lowered himself as far as he could, and then dropped the couple of inches to the floor, wobbling a little on the landing but keeping his feet. “ _Ja,”_ he said, a little sheepish. “ _Ein kleines Spiel_ for me. Sergeant says ‘ten’, I make eleven. He says, “twelve’, I make _dreizehn—_ thirteen _.”_

Pettigrew grinned as he got to his feet from the mat. “Oh, so you like odd numbers. That’s your little game, you mean?”

“Odd numbers?”

“Can’t divide ‘em by two.”

Arnheiter shook his head. “Nein, I like _Primzahlen._ They can’t divide by anything.” He shrugged. “I know, _es ist dumm, blödsinnig_. But I always do it since school days.”

“Hey, whatever makes it fun,” said Pettigrew. “The mat’s all yours, if you want it.” He took Arnheiter’s place at the chin bar and began to count as he pulled himself up rhythmically.

Arnheiter went to the mat area, perched on the low bench against the wall and lowered himself to the carpeted floor. Locking the knee of his artificial leg, he worked his way backward until the soles of his shoes were against the wall, and then raised himself on his arms in a plank position.

“Hold on, I’ll join you.” Hitch quickly got into the same position on the other mat and took off his glasses to set them to one side. “How many? Seventeen, twenty-three, …?”

“ _Neunundzwanzig_ – twenty-nine?”

“Let’s go for broke,” Hitch teased. “Thirty-one!” They both started.

A few minutes later, the three junior members of the team were joined by Troy and Moffitt. “What are you guys up to?”

“Hey, Sarge,” said Tully, dropping down from the chin bar. “Me, I’m just doing calisthenics.” He jerked a thumb at Hitch and Arnheiter, with a chuck. “Those two are playin’ math games.”

Troy eyed the youngest two men, Hitch doing sit-ups while Arnheiter held his feet and counted aloud, _siebzehn, achtzehn, neunzehn…_ “Math games?”

“Yeah, they’re counting everything with prime numbers. Just for the fun of it, I guess.”

Troy shook his head, amused. _You know, I think this is gonna work…_ He was pleased and gratified that Hitch and Tully seemed to have simply accepted the German corporal as part of the team; he could already see that they were developing a rapport, a kind of camaraderie all their own.

Hitch had finished his set of repetitions, and he sat up and retrieved his glasses. “Your turn,” he said to Arnheiter. “I’ll hold your ankles, okay?”

“O.K. This one we not use in the Wehrmacht. So maybe I do it wrong…” He got into the position Hitch had been in, lying flat on his back on the mat. “This is right?”

“Yeah, you got it.” The American moved over to kneel in front of Arnheiter and take hold of his ankles. It felt strange, gripping one ankle of flesh and blood, while the other was of wood, rubber, and steel. “When you sit up, bring each elbow to the other knee. But if you never did sit ups before, just stick to ten or eleven. More than that, you won’t be able to move tomorrow.”

At twenty-five minutes past seven, they were all back in the kitchen for breakfast. Their weekly gift of fresh eggs was gone now except for two, which would probably end up as an ingredient in another dish at some point.

That day, as most days, breakfast was oatmeal porridge with bread and coffee. As the five men sat down to eat, Hitchcock spoke up. “Say, Fritz,” he said, seized with a sudden inspiration. “Have you ever heard of Joseph Pilates? He’s a German, too... he invented a whole system of physical conditioning about 25 years ago.”

Arnheiter thought a few minutes, and shook his head. “ _Nein_ , I have not. Who is this Pilates?”

“In the States, he’s famous for inventing this system. He has a studio in New York, but he came up with the whole thing in the last war. I’d forgotten that part until you mentioned the Isle of Man a couple days ago. He was a German civilian here in England when the war started, so that’s where he ended up, interned there with thousands of other guys. They were all kind of going stir crazy until Pilates started getting all of them doing physical training with this jury-rigged equipment that he invented on the spot.” Hitch added a little evaporated milk to his coffee, and went on. “Anyway, you might be interested in some of the techniques he has. I used to go to a class when I was in high school, so I might still have the book he wrote, if you want to see it. If my kid sister Barbara can find it, I’ll ask her to send it along.”

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

“Well, Corporal," said the amiable brown-haired doctor, John Carey, as he greeted his newest patient. "I've heard quite a lot about you, from these fellows." He nodded to the two sergeants, who were also in the briefing room for the beginning of the consultation, mostly so that Moffitt could act as interpreter if needed. "It's been eight months since you were wounded, I believe. How have you been getting on?"

Arnheiter hesitated, not sure what to tell the English doctor, nor how to say it. "It is all right," he said. "I can do most things."

"Are you in pain?" The young German's face reddened. He didn't want to admit it, but it was true. "At night, yes. Sometimes the day also."

"What does it feel like? Burning, cramping, yes? Or something else?"

"It is like a horse is standing on my foot and I cannot move him away. Other times the pain is in my knee." Carey made notes in his book and went on. "I told Troy here that I wanted to see the leg you have. May I?"

"Yes, sir." As he was not wearing it, having been told he was getting a physical, Arnheiter calmly handed the appliance over to the doctor. Carey turned it over in his hands, examining the design. "I see," he said, "It’s the first one for you, so it’s an adjustable socket.” He looked it over. “But it's had a lot of hard wear in a short time-- what on earth have you been doing? Did they have you working as a navvy?" he exclaimed.

Arnheiter shook his head, not understanding most of what Carey had said, and Moffitt hastily translated the best he could, improvising as he explained what a navvy was. Then as he understood the doctor's question, to their surprise his face lit up and his clear blue eyes sparkled with pleasure. " _Ich und der Herr Doktor, wir sind oft Wandern gegangen._ "

Carey nodded, but frowned slightly. "I've got all of that except 'wandern'," he said to Moffitt. "He and the doctor went where?"

"Hillwalking," the English sergeant explained. "Rambling, trekking, that sort of thing. Americans call it hiking."

Carey’s eyes widened with surprise. "You were trekking? After how many months?"

"In April we began. It was mud in many places, but MacNèill knows where to go."

"Five months post surgery, you were rambling hills... with the camp doctor," Carey marveled. "Whatever for?"

Arnheiter's smile faded, and his expression grew sober. " _Der Herr Doktor_ and I made a... " He turned to Troy. "I don't know how to say this..." Troy, who had already heard the story, nodded. "You and he made a deal."

"Yes, a deal," Arnheiter echoed and turned back to Dr Carey. "He promised to take me in the hills, if I promised not to try to die again."

"Good God," murmured the doctor. "Seriously, you were trying..."

"Yes. But MacNèill gave his word if I would not do it again, he would teach me that I could still be a _Wandersmann_." He paused, and went on. "He took me as far as he was allowed to. We walked Carn Beag, and Meall a'Chorainn, and we make twice attempt to climb Fionn Bheinn. But is too far for me."

Carey, who had never been in the Highlands, didn't recognize any of those names. "Sounds impressive," he replied. "How high are those?"

“Carn Beag is 508 meters. Meall a' Chorainn is 700, I think. Fionn Bheinn is 980."

"My God! You climbed 3000 feet?! With this? You're barking mad!"

"No, sir," replied Arnheiter, amused. "Not all the way. But I am de... de..."

"Determined," supplied Troy, grinning.

"Determined. _Ich bin Wandervogel_. I was not do it alone," he added. "MacNèill helped me. But he did not carry me, nor did the pony. All the steps were mine."

“I see.” Carey shook his head. Well, let us go into your room and we will use that for the examination.”

“Well?” asked Troy as the doctor and Arnheiter emerged from the radio room into the parlor. “What’s the verdict?”

“Excellent health, on the whole,” replied Carey, removing his stethoscope and placing it in his bag. He and his patient sat down in the parlor to join Troy and Moffitt. “I see from his file from Dalcorrie that he should be getting one tablet at night of a codeine compound for relieving pain. I will submit the prescription to our chemist and have it delivered to me, and I will bring it to you.”

“Seems all right,” Troy agreed. “Anything else?”

“In fact, yes, rather in the nature of good news.” Carey made sure he was addressing Arnheiter. “You’re actually due for a new leg at this point. The one you have is functional, but the socket no longer fits as closely as it should—there’s only so much you can adjust it. So you need to be fitted with an improved version, with a different type of adjustable socket. And it’s lucky that you turned up here in Wimbledon, as we have the premiere artificial-limbs centre in Britain, if not all of Europe. Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton, is a mere two miles away, on the other side of Putney Heath. They have been treating wounded servicemen since the Great War.

“That is a hospital for soldiers?”

“Yes, primarily, but …”

Arnheiter shook his head, discouraged. “They will not help me. I am the enemy. I am not a person those men want to see, ever.”

Moffitt winced. _He’s got a point there._

Carey briefly touched the radioman’s shoulder. “You leave that to me. I can talk to Philip Ainsworth and he’ll see what they can do. It may take some time, and it may have to be as an outpatient, but we’ll get the job done, mark my words. We’re officially responsible for your medical care, so the Government will have to hold up their end.”

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

“Don’t take this wrong, Fritz, but… who built this thing?” Tully Pettigrew turned over the leather, wood, and steel apparatus in his hands. “Buddy, you need a mechanic. It’s a kludge…”

The German frowned. “What means kludge?” He had no objection to letting the two Americans examine the workings of his prosthesis out of mechanical curiosity, and had willingly handed it to them.

“Um…” Hitchcock considered how to explain the slang term to someone with limited English. “A kludge is something that works… it’ll get the job done— but it ought to work better. It’s not efficient.”

“Ach, _effizient_. Almost same _auf Deutsch_.” He shrugged. The thing was the way it was.

“Like this, I mean,” Pettigrew said, moving the knee joint. “Unless it’s locked, it just swings free, right? Like a pendulum. Every step, you gotta pause a second for it to straighten all the way so you can step on it.”

“ _Ja_ ,” Arnheiter agreed. “ _Sie haben recht_.” He had learned the hard way what happened if he tried to step on it too soon.

“He’s right, I’ve watched you do it.” Hitch took a closer look. “You know, a spring would fix that…”

“Yep,” said Tully. “Just what I was thinking. A spring about the size of my finger would do it, cost a quarter maybe.”

“A spring?” Arnheiter had never considered trying to modify this piece of crucial equipment… but as he thought about it, the two Americans were right. A spring would bend when he had weight on the leg, and would pull the joint open quickly as soon as his weight was off it. He could walk faster, not just at one speed, pausing every other step for the knee joint to swing into position. He started to smile. “ _Das stimmt_ … I like it.” He thought a moment more. “Where we find spring?”

“Well, if English folks had screen doors, which they don’t,” Pettigrew said thoughtfully, “we could use the spring that pulls your screen door shut. That’d be about the right size.”

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

“Ish? What is this “ish”?” A few days later, Arnheiter was eyeing the two younger Americans with mock irritation as all of them were in the sitting room working with the Army-issued German language materials. “You must say, _ich. Ich, ich, ich—_ not ‘ish’.”

“Now, wait a minute, Fritz. The book says ‘ish’. For every word like that, not just “ich”. Look, it’s right here.” Pettigrew showed him the small olive-drab booklet, TM 30-606, _War Department Technical Manual._ “See? It’s got SH everywhere, for those ‘ch’ letters, except at the end of some of the words where it’s KH instead. Is the book wrong?”

Arnheiter thumbed through the book, muttering to himself as he read some of the words and phrases aloud, shaking his head. “Who wrote this? Most of us don’t say that way. Only Dresdeners. Or maybe in Berlin.”

Moffitt was nodding in agreement. “I say, let me have a look, would you?” He had been staying out of the way when the American intelligence officer had been working with the three Americans and the phrase book, as he hadn’t wanted to confuse them, but he too had noted that the pronunciation he had learned as a student wasn’t the same as in the War Department’s phrase book. “Interesting— the preface gives you how to pronounce all the other unfamiliar sounds, but not that one. It simply uses SH throughout, even in words like _möchte_ , and _Mechaniker_.” He handed it back, and Arnheiter saw that the book instructed its readers to say me-SHa-ni-ker, meaning ‘mechanic.’ “I suspect,” he added, “that since ‘sh’ is a correct pronunciation for _ch_ in some words, in some parts of Germany, that it’s easier to just teach you to say “ish, mish, dish” than to explain how to pronounce the more common one.”

“All right,” said Troy, “so how do you say that? And why the difference?”

Arnheiter demonstrated with his own name, Friedrich, and with several of the words in the phrase book. “I don’t know how to tell you the right way, only to say it for you.” He thought a minute or two. “Did you hear Hauptmann Dietrich say his own name, ever?”

Troy cast his memory back to the desert. “Yeah... yeah, I did. Once speaking English, and once speaking German to someone else, on the phone.”

“He does not say ‘ish’. That I know, certain.”

“No, he doesn’t. You’re right.”

“In the north they say _ik_ and not _ich,_ except in school. Mostly he says _ich, mich, sich,_ but not always. Sometimes _ik_. In the south, in Bayern, they just say _i.”_ He handed the booklet back to Tully, and sighed. “I am sorry, please forgive. Now I make you all confusing.”

“No,” Troy answered thoughtfully. “You’re right to say so, Fritz. See, most of the guys using this little book here aren’t gonna be trying to pass for real Germans. The uniform kind of gives them away.” He smiled, making a mild joke, and then grew serious. “They just need to make themselves understood, and understand the other guy who they maybe just captured or are questioning. And if their pronunciation is so-so, it doesn’t matter. But sometimes we’ll have to answer a question, or say something that makes sense, and it has to sound good. So that makes you the expert here.”

The radioman’s eyes widened, anxious, and he started shaking his head. “I am no teacher, Sergeant... I cannot tell you rules for _Grammatik_.”

“No, but you are the only native German we got. So why don’t you go through the book with us, and you say each thing aloud so we know how it’s supposed to sound sound. We’ll copy your pronunciation.”

Which was exactly what they did, that day and many days thereafter. He read aloud the sentences in the phrase book, and the three Americans followed along, reading each sentence after him, sometimes several times until they all had it correct.


	7. Smoke Signals and Circuit Diagrams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much of the information about ciphers in this chapter, particularly regarding the Playfair cipher, comes from David Kahn's _The Codebreakers_ (which I read many, many years ago), as well as from Dorothy Sayers's novel _Have His Carcase._
> 
> To my delight, I discovered a Playfair cipher generator online, which allows the user to fill in the keyword into the first blanks in the grid, after which the software completes the grid. Then if one enters the original message (cleartext) into the entry field, the program generates the ciphertext. It's much faster than the paper-and-pencil approach, I must say.
> 
> An interesting note: I also found that the Germans also used the Playfair cipher method at that time, but with a twist-- they used a two-grid system, where the output from the first square was then enciphered once more onto the second one. Presumably this method was developed because it's rather difficult to find words in German having eight letters or more, with none repeated.
> 
> The book _The Verse By The Side of The Road_ contains the text of all the Burma-Shave signs that were ever produced.

_Earphones on my head from noon til seven,  
But it doesn’t sound a bit like “My Blue Heaven”—  
Just didi-didi-dah, didi-didi-dit, didi-didi-dah, didi-dah  
_

_—Anonymous USN radioman, scribbled on a card tacked up in the radio shack of the USS Idaho, 1941  
(from personal communication , James G. McKernon, USMC, ret.)_

Shortly before noon, Troy and Moffitt returned to the Wimbledon house on M— Street after meeting with Major MacDonald and Major Maitland at M.I. Tully Pettigrew was in the sitting room, working at the German language material they had been issued, and the door to the radio room was closed although the murmur of voices could be heard from within. Troy slung the cap of his Class A uniform onto the hat tree by the door. “How’s it going, Tully? What are they up to?” He jerked a thumb towards the closed door on the other side of the entryway.

Pettigrew shook his head, amused. “Hell if I know, Sarge. Hitch doesn’t know much German, and Fritz knows some English, but I guess they’re getting by with smoke signals and circuit diagrams. The only language they have in common is Morse code. For a few minutes there, they were kind of getting sore about something, but I guess it worked out all right.”

Troy didn’t like the sound of that. _Better check on those guys,_ he thought. “How are you doing with the language book?”

“Better, I think. Having two guys around here who speak it helps.”

 _I hope he’s right about that._ Then Troy stepped across and rapped on the door to the radio room, before opening it. “How’s it going?”

Mark Hitchcock looked up with a smile. The light glinted off the lenses of his glasses for a brief moment. “Just fine, Sarge,” he answered, clearly in high spirits. “We’re double checking all the components now, and making an inventory list, since we’re the ones who’ll have to fix it.”

Troy looked around and realized that the two of them had completely taken the newly-issued transceiver to pieces. “What do you mean, fix it? I thought that set was brand new.”

Hitch nodded, and unconsciously popped his gum. “Yeah, it sure is. But we figured we’d better make a list of all the components that might need to be replaced so we can have spares on hand. After all, it’s not like he can just go get replacement resistors or tubes while we’re gone.”

“Good thinking. Keep it up,” Troy said, and left them to their work.

An hour or so later, Hitch got up and took the spool of copper wire in one hand. “I guess now we find out if we can make this work,” he said. They had wired the telegraph keys to each other, and to two sets of headphones. To keep their practice coding off the airwaves, they were simply going to transmit messages to each other over the wire. Hitch took the second headset and the telegraph key and headed through the parlor and the kitchen, and finally out the door to the garden.

This was where the other Rats came in. Tully Pettigrew followed Hitch out into the back garden, while Moffitt remained in the new radio room with Arnheiter. After a couple of test messages back and forth proved successful, Troy began with Arnheiter, handing him a slip of paper with a message to send. The young German read the message, consulted their compiled list of code words to change the clear text into the coded text, and used pen strokes to divide the text into five-letter code groups. Then he put the headset on, and began to transmit the coded message with the straight key. Once his sending was well under way, Troy went out into the back garden, where Hitch was sitting on the bench, transcribing the coded message as he heard it coming in. Hitch then took a pen and converted it back to cleartext before handing the slip to Troy. “Well, Sarge?”

Troy nodded. The two younger men had sent and received the message perfectly, which read, LONDON BRIDGE IS FALLING DOWN, MY FAIR LADY. “Yeah, so far so good.” He paused a moment, thinking.

Hitch looked up. “Don’t get too fancy, Sarge. Most of the words have to be in the code list, until we can make up a longer one.” Any short words that did not have a code word assigned were encoded using a substitution cipher. “So we can’t do “Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands”, or stuff like that.” He thought a moment. “Actually, maybe we should... get familiar with each other’s sending, before we tackle the code book.”

Pettigrew suddenly chuckled. “Hey, Sarge, you ought to make ‘em do Burma Shave jingles... or ‘Casey at the Bat.’”

“I think we’d have a mutiny on our hands!” Troy grinned, composed another message, and handed it to Hitch. “Here you go.” Once Hitch had coded it and sent it, then Troy asked him the question he’d been wondering about. “By the way, Tully here said it sounded like you two were getting into it. So what happened?”

Mark Hitchcock rolled his eyes, embarrassed. “My fault, Sarge. How was I supposed to know? Bet you didn’t either. The language barrier covers more than just words... and I found that out in a hurry.”

“Yeah? Go on.”

“Well, he had a good idea about something, and I told him, great, OK...like this,” he explained, and made the common American gesture for “OK”, with the thumb and index finger touching in a circle. “I can tell you now, Sarge, don’t ever do that with a German guy you wanna be chums with. I think it’s just about the same as givin’ him the... well, giving him the finger.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Who was there, Sarge, you or me?” Hitch countered. “No, I’m not kidding. You wouldn’t be either, if you’d seen how mad he was for a couple minutes.”

“You must’ve got it straightened out, then. You and Fritz were fine when I got back.”

“Yeah. It was kind of touchy, there for a while. He got mad and wanted to know why I’d do a thing like that to him. I said, What are you talkin’ about? That means O.K.! He just kinda looked at me for a minute, and said, “That...that...means to you, to _Amis_ , O.K.? Just O.K.?” I said, sure, what does it mean to you? He wouldn’t even say, but he got all red in the face.”

Tully, who had been listening, whistled softly. “I can pretty much figure that out,” he said. “Bet you can too. Guess we should remember it’s not just him who has the language barrier. We do, too, except for Moffitt.”

“So how’d you sort it out?”

“Decided it was time for a coffee break. The three of us had some coffee and some Oreos, and gave us time for Fritz to stop being mad, and me to stop feeling like an idiot.” Hitch sighed. “I didn’t mean anything by it, Sarge. I never thought that’d mean something different in different places.”

“Well, now we know.” Tully pointed to Moffitt, giving them a thumbs up from inside, at the kitchen window. “And I didn’t hear what was going on, but I could tell both of you were pretty worked up.”

“So we went back to the radio, and I apologized, and he accepted. Then we just kept on working.”

Late that night, Troy laid aside the newspaper upstairs in the room where he slept. He was about to put the light out and turn in for the night when he heard something, a sound from downstairs. He listened intently, and then he realized the sound was coming from the kitchen when he heard a chair being moved on the old red tile floor. He debated with himself a few moments whether to go and investigate or whether to leave well enough alone. He pulled on a robe over his nightshirt and went.

When Troy got downstairs, he found what he had already guessed he would find. Arnheiter was sitting at the table, silent, his head in his hands while the yellow light of the one stubby candle shone on his tawny hair. He looked up but said nothing.

 _I was kind of expecting he was gonna have trouble with this...right about now._ Troy didn’t say anything either, but he went to the stove, lit it, poured what was left of the coffee into a pan and warmed it over the low gas flame. Watching the younger man out of the corner of his eye, the American sergeant then divided the steaming brew between two chipped mugs, added powdered milk and a piece of sugar to both, and set one in front of the German and the other one in front of the chair he pulled out for himself. “Today brought it all back, didn’t it?” he said quietly.

Arnheiter’s blue eyes widened in surprise. “How you know?”

Troy shrugged. “I saw it in your face when you picked up the straight key out of the box of radio equipment.” He took a sip of his own coffee. “Want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Before today, when was the last time you sent code?”

“With a key?” Arnheiter frowned a moment, thinking back. “October, late October. When we still had a camp. The mobile trans... trans...”

“Transceiver.”

The German nodded. “The transceivers in the communications truck have no key, only _der rote Knopf_ — the red button.” He pantomimed using his thumb on the signal button for a moment before picking up his mug and gratefully drinking some of the hot coffee.

“Yeah, ours were that way too.” Troy was silent a minute before saying anything else. “What woke you?”

“Dreaming. Strange dreams. Sometimes dreams are...” he began, and then stopped. He thought a little, and tried again to say what he meant. “Some dreams are remembering. Not this one. I must to stop dreaming that. So I got up.”

Troy nodded, understanding. “Yeah. Sometimes we dream about what didn’t happen— because it’s what we’re afraid of. When I was about sixteen, after my dad died, my kid brother and I went on a canoeing and fishing trip with our uncle Mike and his boys, our cousins, up in this area called the Boundary Waters. Part of it is in Canada, but not where we were. Anyway, Dave, my brother, was fooling around and fell out of the canoe. Uncle Mike went in after him and fished him out. He got banged up a little, swallowed some of the lake, but he was okay. Dave wasn’t even really hurt, and we kept on fishing— but for months I kept dreaming that he fell in the lake and drowned. I kept getting up in the middle of the night to go look in his room and make sure he wasn’t dead.”

Arnheiter listened and nodded, understanding. “Because your father died. You feared your brother die too, even if not real.”

“Yep. Like I said, a lot of dreams are about what scares the hell out of us, not what really happened.”

“ _Ja._ I have not dream this before, only now after being a radioman again. The dream was still the last day, at El Alamein, in _Kompanie_ 1’s radio truck, but I was not shot.”

“And Dietrich was.”

 _“Ja, genau._ And I could do nothing for him. In front of me, in the truck, he died. That was the dream. Even that I know is not real.”

“That’s how our minds work. Your imagination will come up with stuff that’s even worse than reality, and then spring it on you in the middle of the night when your guard’s down.” Troy finished his own coffee, picked up both empty cups, and set them on the sideboard.

Arnheiter watched him, and spoke up. “Sergeant...”

“Yeah?”

“Why you come down here? Do not say you just wanted some more coffee...” There was a slight smile both in his tone and his expression.

“I heard you moving around down here. And, well, I don’t sleep that great here yet. We’ve spent the last couple years in the middle of nowhere, not the middle of a city... so I hear everything. But there’s more to it.”

“ _Ja,_ I think so...”

“Fritz, I’m not your captain. I can’t be him— he’s a helluva lot taller than I am, to start with,” Troy said, half-joking. “But I am your sergeant. Whatever’s eating you—even if you just need to blow a fuse, come to me. That’s my job. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“All right, lights out. Go hit the sack. Lot of work tomorrow.”

The next several days passed in much the same way. To Troy’s surprise, Hitch and Arnheiter turned out to make a good team, once they got past a few misunderstandings. Their coding practice sessions were often punctuated by laughter as the two young men practiced by sending one another jokes, pieces of songs, and, as Tully had suggested, Burma-Shave jingles.

“Okay,” said Hitch with a chuckle as Fritz came in from the yard—what the British neighbors would call a garden. “What did I send you?”

The German shook his head, with a puzzled expression. “I think it has mistakes. I not know why.” He consulted the piece of paper he had written the message on. “It says, “A peach looks good/ With lots of fuzz... that is a word?”

Hitch grinned, eyes dancing with mirth. “Yeah, so far so good. What’s the rest?”

“A peach / Looks good/ With lots of fuzz/ But man’s no peach/And never wuz#.... wuz? That’s a mistake. Not a word.”

“Well, no... not spelled that way. But that’s how I sent it. And that’s how the ad was written.”

“Why you send me wrong words?” Arnheiter accepted the glass of water Moffitt handed him. “You make a joke?” He had learned by now that Americans found humor in the oddest things.

“More like a quiz,” Hitchcock confessed. “I was curious whether you’d take “wuz” down just as I sent it or if you’d correct it as it should be spelled.”

“Ach. I always record messages as sent. So, what I sent you?”

“Um, let’s see. It looks like a couple of proverbs. Here goes. _Hunde, die bellen, beißen nicht._ I think it says, dogs that do something don’t bite? What’s _bellen?”_

 _“_ The sound dogs make, that is _bellen_.”

Troy chuckled. “Is that the same as ‘A dog’s bark is worse than his bite’?”

“Indeed it is,” affirmed Moffitt. “What’s the rest of your message, Hitch?”

“The second part says, _Wo ein Wille ist, da ist auch ein Weg.”_ He smiled. “I can get that one—where there’s a will, there’s a way. You guys say that too?”

“Once, yes. Long ago.” The German’s expression grew somber for a moment before he sighed and went on.

The three younger men soon developed what seemed like a game, but in fact was a matter of great importance. At random intervals, Hitch or Tully would call out a word, such as “boneyard”, or “removing”, or “campfire”. One rainy afternoon, Arnheiter called Hitch over to look at the newspaper he was perusing. “Here is one,” he said. “And another. But I don’t know how they mean.”

“Hey, that’s a good one,” said Hitch. “Porcelain. And the other one? Oh, ‘geranium’. Great— and I see ‘starling’ right there too. Attaboy!” He took out a slip of paper and a pencil stub from his pocket and added the three words. “I’ll type these up too.”

“Okay, what are you guys doing?” Troy came in to the kitchen, amused. “Is this some kind of language lesson?”

“No, Sarge. They’re keywords for the Playfair cipher. They have to be eight letters or more, with no repeats…”

“So we’re collecting as many as we can. You just said one, Hitch,” Tully remarked with a chuckle. “Keywords’ has eight nonrepeating letters.”

“Found another one.” Arnheiter pointed again, and read slowly aloud. “Or-gan-ize.”

“Um.. yep, got that one already. Any more on that page?” The three of them scanned the pages spread out on the kitchen table.

“I’d call that a rousing success, wouldn’t you?” Moffitt said as he and Troy went into the briefing room. Behind them, one voice called out “Asteroid”, and another added “Overhaul.”

“Yeah.” Troy nodded, satisfied. “It was a little rocky at first, but They’ve done it. He’s part of the team now.” _There’s no “us” and “him.” It’s just “us.”_

“Integral!”

“Informal.”

“Mar..in..ate. No, sorry. Two letters A.”

On Sunday afternoon, Hitch found Arnheiter out of doors in the back garden, with one of his English lesson books. “Hey,” he said by way of greeting, as he sat down on the other garden bench. “A couple of us are going on kind of a supply run— is there anything you want us to bring back for you?”

The young German looked up, surprised. “What you mean? Food, or clothes, or things?”

Hitch shrugged. “Depends. What do you need? Or want?”

“I have no _Geld_ to pay with…”

“You don’t have to. You’re part of the team, and we do. Besides, I think the government allots you a certain amount as a stipend or something. So… what do you need?”

Putting a twig into the book to mark his place, Arnheiter considered this. He had the necessities: clothing, food, a bed, a roof. His sketchbook was running low on fresh pages. “Paper for drawing? But paper is limited, I know… perhaps there is none.”

“Beats me. Worth a try, anyhow.”

“If England has a chess- magazine? That would be good.”

“You play chess?”

“Yes, very happy.” He knew that wasn’t the right way to express _sehr gern_ , but he didn’t know the English equivalent.

“Okay,” said Hitch, making a note. “Drawing paper and a chess magazine. See what I can find. Moffitt’s going with me, so he’ll know if anyone does.” He paused, seeing a change in Arnheiter’s expression. “You okay?” he asked. “You seem kind of, I dunno, like something’s eating you.”

“I am okay.” He hesitated, not wanting to complain about what was in fact an excellent situation. “But I am not—what do you say?— not a city boy. This place has streets and streets and more streets and towers. I see no place green. No hills, no Natur.”

Now it was clear. “Ohh, I get it. Like Heidi in Frankfurt— She kept trying to see the mountains and all she saw was the city.”

Arnheiter sat up straighter, astonished. “ _Heidi_? You know Heidi? How?” The Swiss children’s novel was famous in Europe, of course.

“Well, yeah, everybody knows Heidi. It’s a famous book, in English. My kid sister Barbara loved that book when she was little— I read it to her three or four times. They even made a couple of movies out of it. The last one was mostly just to show off how cute little Shirley Temple is.” The American chuckled. “Barbara was really mad, cause they left out two-thirds of the story. Anyway, like I said… you in London are like Heidi in Frankfurt. You’re in the middle of the biggest city in Europe, and you’re homesick.”

“Yes, and no. Not only my town I wish for, but hills, and water, and rocks against the sky. In the desert, even in the prisoners’ camp, _die Natur_ is everywhere. Here there are only roads and _Gebäude_ and more roads.”

Hitch nodded, thoughtful. As a New Yorker, he’d never really thought about that. “Well, I know there are some big parks around here. Maybe we can get the OK to go there with you sometime.”


	8. Ready Or Not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All the team's preparations have led up to this moment. Ready or not, the Rat Patrol leaves on their next mission in a few hours. Was Troy's plan to add a fifth man the right decision? They're about to find out.

“Okay,” said Troy as he and Moffitt came in to the house after an early-morning briefing at the Horse Guards. “Briefing room, five minutes.” It was nearly noon.

“Right, Sarge.” Hitch grinned. He knew that look, and what it meant. _We’re back in action_... “Sorry, we’ll have to finish the game later.” He and Arnheiter were in the sitting room, playing chess with the handsomely carved walnut and boxwood set that Hitch and Tully had discovered in one of the cabinets. He drained the last of his coffee, and got up from the sofa.

Arnheiter looked from Hitch to Troy, uncertain. “I come too? Or no?”

Troy jerked his thumb toward the door of what had once been the formal dining room. “Get in there, on the double.”

“ _Ja,_ I come.” He had hesitated for a fraction of a second— in his army, orders given in that tone were generally replied to with “ _Jawohl,”_ but he guessed that such an answer would not be welcome to the Allied men. He got up from the table where they were playing, pushed the chair in, and followed Hitchcock and Pettigrew.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

“I hope you guys are ready,” the American sergeant growled, “but ready or not—we leave tonight.”

“What’s the mission?” Pettigrew asked quietly.

“A German colonel, by the name of Krebel, has stated his intent to defect. He’s been holed up in a monastery in France for the last couple of weeks. He took his assigned leave, and used it to escape there.”

“Full marks for originality, I would say,” observed Moffitt dryly.

“Yeah, guess so. Anyway, his leave is up in a couple of days, so when he doesn’t return to his unit, all hell is going to break loose and they’ll start searching for him.”

“Are any of the Resistance groups in on it?

“No. They aren’t used to dealing with potential defectors. The Resistance isn’t touching this one with a ten-foot pole. They don’t believe he’s on the level, and they don’t want anything to do with him. ”

“So it’s up to us,” remarked Tully.

“That’s about it. The abbot wants him out of there, sanctuary or no sanctuary, before the Luftwaffe get wise and starts hunting him all over the place when he fails to return from leave. That’s where we come in. So,” Troy said, “We leave at 2100, under cover of darkness. They fly us over, we drop near the monastery, grab the colonel, and get out of there. We ‘ll get to the coast and come back by sea, and with luck we’ll be back here by tomorrow night or the next morning.”

Once the briefing ended, Hitch, Tully, and Arnheiter returned to the radio room to coordinate. Hitch reminded the young German, “You know, you still need a call sign, Fritz. We never did sort that out. But we have to pick one for you now.”

“I know now. You want names from old stories, _ja?_ Use ZS for me.” He pronounced it “zed-ess” in the British fashion rather than “zee-ess” like the Americans.

“ZS? What’s that mean?” Tully frowned, puzzled.

“It is for Zinnsoldat. The story about the tin soldier. He is _standhaft_ —I don’t know that in English—to the end.”

“Wait a minute,” said Hitch. “I know that story… it’s in my Hans Christian Andersen book I had when I was a kid. The Steadfast Tin Soldier, it’s called. He was loyal to his girl, the ballerina paper doll.”

“ _Ja_ , it is that story. Whatever happen, he doesn’t turn back or run away. And, well, .. never mind,” he said, trailing off.

“Oh, yeah…. He was the last one of twenty-five made from an old tin spoon,” Hitch said slowly, remembering pieces of the story he hadn’t read in many years. “And there wasn’t enough tin to finish him, so he had only one leg. Is that why you chose that name?”

Arnheiter shrugged, admitting to it. “The story say he was not less brave than all the others.”

Tully spoke up. “Okay. But are you sure you want to call yourself that? You see, if we say some guy is a ‘tin soldier’, it’s not a compliment.”

“No? What it means?”

“It means that guy can’t think for himself, he doesn’t have any sense. He just follows orders like a machine. That sure isn’t you—if it was, you wouldn’t be here. A tin soldier is just what you’re not. You see?”

Hitch was writing into the code list. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We can use ZS for your call sign—that’ll be easy to hear. It’s dah, dah, di-dit, di-di-dit. Okay for now?

“Okay _bei mir_ ,” Arnheiter agreed. “What now?”

“Now we check code lists against each other. Like Troy said, make sure our decoder rings match.” The Cornell alum grinned. “I think this is going to work really well. You nervous?”

" _Ja_ , I am. If I make mistakes, terrible things happen.”

“You won’t. You’re worrying about it now, but when it comes down to it, you’ll be fine.” Tully thumped the radioman on the shoulder. “You two get your codes checked, all right?” He got up and left the room to confer with Moffitt and Troy.

“Here are our call signs, you remember,” Hitch went on. “RH is Troy, LJ is Moffitt, WS is me, and FT is Tully—Robin Hood, Little John, Will Scarlet, and Friar Tuck.” _Maybe we should call him Alan a Dale, or Much the Miller. Anyway, we can figure that out later._

“ _Ja_ , I remember. Now the other code words.” He and Hitchcock cross-checked their two lists to be certain they had the same clear text and code text words. Then they compiled and matched their lists of cipher keywords.

Meanwhile, Troy and Moffitt were doing their own briefing and planning alone in the briefing room. “Say, Moffitt,” Troy began. “You have your old Webley here?”

“Yes,” the English sergeant answered, unsure what Troy was getting at. “Why?”

“Can you get it? And load it. Don’t ask why.”

“All right, it’s in my kit upstairs.” _What is he planning to do with that? It’s not in the best condition after three years in the desert. _However, he knew by now that Troy’s occasional wild ideas were generally good ones. Half an hour later, he had oiled and loaded his original Army issue pistol and he brought it back to the briefing room. “What do you need to use that for?”

“If we’re lucky, nothing.” Troy took the Webley and walked over to the desk in the corner of the briefing room, opened the drawer, placed the revolver in easy reach, and closed the drawer firmly. “And, by the way, you didn’t see that.”

It took a moment for Moffitt to realize what the American intended. “Oh, I say… Yes, I suppose you’re right. Better safe than sorry, what?”

“Yeah,” Troy said, with a grim tone in his voice. “Leave it to Murphy—if anything CAN go wrong, it’s going to, and not when we can do anything about it.”

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

By six o’clock in the evening, all the preparations that could be made had been made. In a couple of hours, an unmarked truck would come to collect the four men of the Rat Patrol and take them to the nearest airfield. However, for the present, there was nothing more they could do towards their mission. Tully and Moffitt were in the kitchen as it was their turn to prepare the evening meal for the whole group. Hitch was still checking and preparing their portable radio set, and making sure there were spare tubes packed. For the time being, Troy and Arnheiter were alone in the sitting room. “Fritz?” Troy said, getting the young German’s attention from his English lesson book. “Come here. I have some more briefing information for you.” He gestured toward the briefing room and went to open the door.

“Okay.” Arnheiter got up from the chair he was in, and followed Troy into the other room, curious to find out what the sergeant wanted to tell him that he hadn’t said already.

“Shut the door,” Troy said and indicated the chair opposite the one he was sitting in. “Sit down.”

Puzzled, Arnheiter did as he was told. There was something in Troy’s expression and his tone that made him wonder if he had somehow failed in his duties or done something wrong.

“All right, the first thing. We are not having this conversation,” Troy said slowly and carefully.

That made no sense. The German shook his head slightly, not comprehending what the sergeant was saying. “I… am not understand you.”

“Okay, let me say that another way. What we are talking about now—it never happened.”

That time, he got the point. “ _Ja,_ now I understand. Many times, I have had talking with _der Herr Hauptma_ nn that did not happen also.”

They were now on the same wavelength. “Yeah, I figured you probably did. That’s a clerk’s job. So, the boys at MI-6 tell us that there are no active German spies in England. According to them, any German agents in Britain have been neutralized—that means killed—or they are being watched. There’s only one problem with that.”

Arnheiter listened and nodded to show he understood. “What is this problem?”

“The problem with that is that I don’t believe it. If there are any German agents active here, MI might not know that. They don’t think so—but they could be wrong. That’s the problem.”

Troy went on. “If there are agents active here, they might –probably not, but they might—have found out that we here in this house work with MI. We are about to be gone for two days, maybe more if things go sideways and not as planned.”

Arnheiter was beginning to grasp what Troy was saying, or he thought he did. What he thought made his heart pound in his chest. “Sergeant, you are thinking that I would tell such men about this,” he gestured to the whole house around him, “that I would betray you?” The idea that, at the very last, Troy really didn’t trust him after all, made him so angry he could barely speak. He half-rose from the chair in his agitation.

 _Oh, my God…_ “No,” Troy stated firmly. “That is not what I mean. Take it easy, Fritz— I know you won’t do that. Sit down, and let me finish.”

The German gave him an uneasy look, but sat down in the chair again. “All right. What you tell me?”

“What I am telling you is that I know you are a noncom and you rate a sidearm, and I also know that MI will not let you be armed because you are still a POW. With me so far?”

“ _Ja_. This is true.”

“I have tried to talk to them, I even went to Colonel Hughes. They will not give you a weapon under any circumstances. Period. They assured me that there will be a guard on the house, 24 hours a day, until we return, the same as there has been before to prevent any agent from getting in and getting access to classified information.”

Arnheiter nodded. That made sense. “I understand this.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t trust that either. Someone could take out that guard and you’d never know it. And they’d cut the telephone lines so you’d have no way to call for help—then they come in and take you out.” Troy’s expression was grim. “The brass have no solution for that. So, here’s my solution—just between you and me. See that desk in the corner?”

“I see it.”

“Go over there and open the drawer.”

Mystified, Arnheiter got up from the chair, crossed the room, and opened the drawer to the desk. Astonished, he turned back to Troy, blue eyes wide, but the American held up a hand to silence him. “You see what’s in the drawer?”

“ _Ja_ , I see it.”

“It’s in there, Fritz, because I’ll be damned if I’m going to leave you here alone with no way to defend yourself if it comes to that. Like hell I am. But here’s the deal—I didn’t give it to you, and I didn’t tell you about it. It was in there, and you just found it. You copy that?”

The young German nodded. Now all was clear. “Copy that.”

“Everything else in here is locked up.” Troy gestured to the file cabinets and the map case. “I had to agree to that for them to bring you here, that you have no access to any classified information except what is specifically needed for our current mission. However, there’s nothing classified in my desk, is there?” He deliberately met the younger man’s eyes.

“No, Sergeant. Nothing at all.” They did trust him.

“Good man.” Troy offered the fair-haired corporal a handshake, which the German accepted and returned. “Let’s go eat. It’s chow time.”

The two men left the briefing room and made their way into the kitchen.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

Supper was a satisfying combination of corned beef hash and tinned cabbage, fried crispy in the big iron frypan. “As close as we could get,” explained Moffitt, “to the traditional bubble and squeak. _Bon appetit_ , you lot,” he added as Tully dished out five portions.

Once they had finished eating, Troy turned to Arnheiter once again. “All right. We are getting picked up in about half an hour. Your orders are to stand down, now, and get some sleep, shut-eye. Be awake and ready to receive transmissions by 0300. Got that? Seven hours from now.”

“ _Ja_ , I understand.” Arnheiter looked at the other four, wanting to say something, and not sure what to say. “Good luck, you say, yes? We say, _viel Glück!”_ Somehow, he didn’t think they would understand _Zicke-zacke, zicke-zacke, hoi, hoi, hoi!_

“Good luck to you too.” Hitch grinned, and thumped him on the shoulder. “See you on the air.”

And a few minutes later, they were gone.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

Arnheiter knew he was ordered to sleep, so that he could be on watch in a few hours, but he wasn’t sure he could. For a while, he aimlessly went around the house, half-expecting that any minute the four Rats would return, that something would have gone awry, or that somehow it might be all a test for him, and they weren’t really leaving the country that night at all.

After half an hour or so, he shook off those thoughts and realized he’d better do what Troy had told him to. Double-checking that the doors and windows were all secured, and the blackout curtains in place, he went into his bedroom, made sure the transceiver was ready to operate, put out the light and lay down.

Although he was quite sure he would be wide awake, it was not long before exhaustion overtook him and he slept.


	9. On the Air

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Rats' mission to extract a Luftwaffe officer who wants to defect turns out to be more complicated than it seemed. Back in London, Arnheiter experiences actual solitude for the first time since he can remember. Then he must decide what to do when they fail to make contact and he hears only silence.

It seemed like only a few minutes before the alarm clock rang stridently in the silence of the large house, but as Arnheiter sat up and hastily turned off the alarm on the old two-bell clock on the nightstand, he saw that it was indeed half-past two in the morning. _Gut_ , he thought, _That gives me a half hour to be ready._ Even though to most people it was the dead of night, he had learned long ago to be able to work even the wee hours. In the blistering and unbearable heat of the North African desert, there had been times when the middle of the night was the only time that one could work in any kind of comfort.

He rose from bed and went into the adjoining bathroom to wash his face and wake himself up. Quickly, he dressed and went into the silent kitchen to get himself the last of the pot of coffee before sitting down at the radio.

While he warmed his coffee and cut a piece of bread, it occurred to him that this was in fact the strangest experience he had ever had; it was even stranger than waking up in a foreign field hospital missing most of his right leg.

As far as he was able to recall, it was the first time since his childhood that he had been truly alone.

In his youth, he had been constantly in the company of others, either in school or the _Wandervogel_ , and later perforce in the _Hitler-Jugend_. The only solitude he could find was when he slipped away to roam the forest trails leading up the nearby summit of the Kickelhahn— he had hiding places there. After leaving school, there had been the army, first in training, then in France, then in the desert. For the last ten years, until today, he had never been alone. Always there had been fellow comrades in the mess, in the radio truck, in his tent, in the hospital, and finally in the prison camp.

But he had no further time to reflect on that, as he was expected on duty in a matter of minutes. Sitting down at his desk, he switched on the radio set and put on his headphones, connecting both the telegraph key and the microphone as a backup. He could hear the faint hum and feel the warmth as the vacuum tubes in the transceiver warmed up gradually.

Outside, it was not yet dawn and still quite dark, and though there would normally be some activity stirring and traffic on the streets, all was quiet now owing to the stringent blackout in force. He, Sergeant Moffitt, and Tully Pettigrew had made very sure that the blackout curtains would completely conceal any light from inside this room. It wouldn’t do at all for the neighbors, or anyone watching the house, to observe that someone was working with lights on in the middle of the night. It would arouse too much suspicion in the people living nearby, and it would give away the fact that there was some kind of activity taking place there in secret.

His nerves now at a high pitch, he waited like a pilot expecting the flag on the runway signaling him to take off. He could not fall asleep now for anything on earth… Eyes closed to attend to the smallest signals, he listened, hearing faint radio transmissions from hundreds of miles away, and sometimes static, but so far, he heard no signals on this frequency.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

Across the Channel, the Rat Patrol had made their way to the region where the monastery was located. It was roughly two miles distant, but they were being very cautious in their reconnoitering. The possibility existed that the officer's taking refuge in the monastery was known. However, at the moment, nothing was stirring in the area-- they should be able to proceed to their destination. 

"Check in, Sarge?" Hitch asked, as they found a place to stop for a few minutes in an outbuilding of a bombed-out farm.

Troy nodded. _Here goes nothing..._ 'We're on the way, on time, all according to plan. No sight of enemy action."

"Got it." Hitchcock and Pettigrew rapidly set up the portable radio set, adjusted the frequency, and Hitch cranked vigorously while listening to the headphone. Fingers on the red button, he tapped out the prearranged call sign, and waited for the acknowledgement to come.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

****

In the house in London, Arnheiter sat, listening for the call sign, heart pounding. They had practiced for weeks... Then it came through, loud and clear. A smile crossed his face as he tapped out the acknowledgement on the straight key under his hand.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

In the ruined farmhouse, Hitch listened intently, waiting for the answering signal from Arnheiter. Then he grinned, and showed the others a thumbs-up. "Got him!" Then with the message text in his hand, he quickly transmitted the letters that the message had been enciphered with.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

Arnheiter took his hand off the telegraph key, grabbed a pencil and started transcribing the message, which was sent in five-letter code groups. "NOOTR LTNKR TKVWN PYBQV SRGMI MNTDO ECIWS RMZRM PBHKI RGFRK AX135" he wrote on the message form. However, it was not for him to decipher the message himself, only to pass it along to MacDonald's team of Intelligence men at Army Headquarters. He replied with the Message Received acknowledgement and added the code group to ask if there were further messages.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

Hitch nodded. "He got it, Sarge. Anything else?"

Troy shook his head and consulted his watch. "Nope. Tell him, next contact 0800, in five hours."

"Right." Hitch pressed the red sending button on the top of the transceiver rhythmically to send the dits and dahs through the airwaves. He looked up then, and removed the headphones. "Acknowledged, over and out."

"So far, so good," Tully remarked. "Hate to treat him like a glorified switchboard operator, though. That ain't right." Their radio operator was supposed to be just that: a conduit for messages. He wasn’t supposed to decipher or read the content of anything they sent.

"Yeah, I know." Troy rolled his eyes in exasperation—MI had made that call. "We'll handle that later. Now we have to get to this rendezvous by 0400 to meet this colonel Krebel. Let's shake it."

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

Having made a copy of the message sent to him, and then sending it himself to MacDonald's office at Headquarters, Arnheiter slowly took off the headphones and looked around. Less than an hour had passed , but it seemed longer. He felt a sense of exhilaration— at last, he had been able to do something, however small, to aid in the fight. Setting the alarm clock once more, he shut off the light on the desk, got back into his bed, and was soon asleep.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

A few hours later, the strident brass bells of the alarm clock rang to awaken Arnheiter once more. He rose, picked up his crutches, and headed toward the stairs. Troy had admonished him not to climb the stairs when he was alone in the house, but it wasn't really a danger, he decided, if he was careful about it. Half an hour later, he was back downstairs toweling his damp hair; a week ago, he had figured out how to manage getting in and out of the antique Victorian claw-footed bathtub upstairs.

He breakfasted on more bread, with reconstituted dried egg scrambled, along with some of the Americans’ powdered coffee. Looking out of the kitchen window, he still was thinking about the strangeness of being entirely alone. No one was here to watch what he did, report on his actions, or threaten him with anything. _I can do anything I wish,_ he thought to himself, amazed by the idea. As long as he was on the air at the specified time, there were no other conditions on him. His time was actually his own, for nearly the first time in his adult life. It was staggering to contemplate. The one thing he could not do, however, was leave the house and its garden. In that, he was still a prisoner.

That was one hardship about being sent to London. In Scotland, there was a landscape to see and think about, and open spaces to walk about even though they were ‘inside the wire’ of the POW camp. Doctor MacNèill had taken him and a few others on walking outings in the nearby hills— _wandern_ was the German word for it. The lack of open spaces, of trees and grass and streams, affected him almost as if it were a physical ache in his chest. But there was nothing for it except to endure it and carry on. There were a great number of situations that were far worse.

Glancing at his watch, he saw that he had half an hour before he needed to be on the air once more to receive messages, so he opened the kitchen door and went out to sit in the garden in the summer morning.

Had he known it, Arnheiter was the object of intense scrutiny from across the lane. Their back-garden neighbor, Mrs. Helen Wainwright, was watching his movements from her arbor, scowling at the newcomer with no little annoyance.

“What is the cause of your sour expression on a lovely day such as this?” inquired her neighbor lightly. Lawrence Appleby, a retired colonel of marines, regarded the middle-aged librarian with some amusement.

She inclined her head toward the garden of the house opposite. “That man there.”

Appleby looked. “Oh, the German chap. The fellow who’s a refugee, that the lads from MI told us about. He doesn’t seem to be doing anything out of the way beyond sitting there in the garden. What’s the trouble?” He had observed the young man on several occasions, out in the garden with some of the Americans who were billeted there, or working on his hands and knees in their “Victory” garden. They had been told that the young German was there in the capacity of a language interpreter and informant to the Americans. _That fellow may be a refugee, but there’s more to him than they’re letting on. I’ve seen him with the two sergeants there, and he’s no more a civilian than I am._ He knew enough about Intelligence work, however, to keep such observations to himself.

“I had intended,” Mrs. Wainwright explained, “to bring the eggs over there to the Americans as I do every week, only that man is there. I want nothing whatever to do with him… when I think of my poor Arthur…” Her only son, Arthur, had been killed in France before the retreat and rescue from Dunkirk.

“Quite so, quite so. Still, you needn’t invite the fellow in for tea, you know. Simply leave the basket, say, “These are for Sergeant Troy,” and go on your way. Or wait until he’s gone indoors, and leave them then.”

“Hmmph. I suppose…” She shook her head, and went back indoors, leaving Lawrence Appleby smoking his pipe and thinking.

As he stood there in his back garden, the young man sitting on the stoop of the house opposite glanced at his watch, got to his feet using a crutch, and went back into the house. _Now, isn’t that interesting, _thought Appleby. _That lad is on a schedule._ He checked his own watch. 7:55. _Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice…_

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

Unaware that his actions had been observed, Arnheiter moved through the kitchen of the house, and through the parlor to the entry, and in the door of the radio room where he slept, which he carefully locked behind him. He seated himself in the swivel chair, plugged in the headphones to the transceiver, connected the telegraph key, and was ready for the scheduled transmission. The clock on the wall showed 7:59.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

“How many of ‘em?” Troy looked up as Hitchcock scrambled down from the loft where he had been watching the surrounding countryside.

“Can’t be sure, Sarge— six, I counted, but might be more.”

“Great.” The colonel couldn’t get to them from the monastery without being seen by this squad that was now patrolling the area.

“Time for a diversion?” Moffitt was already preparing to create one.

Troy held up a hand. “Tully and I can create the diversion. Can you get to that church? Tell them to stand by.” Moffitt nodded and slipped out the door. “Hitch, you get on the radio.”

“What do I tell MacDonald?”

Troy glanced at the list of code words. “Mail delayed, no package yet. Unexpected visitors.”

“Right. Got it.” Hitch quickly took out a pencil, enciphered the code message, and put the headphone on.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

Arnheiter waited. Five minutes had passed. There was the usual background static, and the faint _dits_ and _dahs_ audible from adjacent frequencies, but on this frequency—nothing. The only other sounds he heard were the ticking of the clock on the wall (synchronized to the BBC) and the pounding of his own heart. Reflexively, he checked, and checked again, that everything on his end was in order. He was on the correct frequency at the correct time, and all the connections were sound. The headphone jack was plugged in and none of the vacuum tubes had burned out. There was simply no contact. _Etwas ist schief gegangen..._ He looked up once more at the clock: 8:23.

Something had gone wrong. And there was nothing he could do except wait.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

Moffitt made a dash for the walled monastic garden, where they were to meet the colonel they were escorting. He ran crouched, hoping to not be seen by the enemy. After a few minutes, he heard some explosions at a distance. “Troy’s diversion, I presume…” He reached the safety of the garden gate and a young monk was there to open it for him. “ _Guten Morgen, Herr Oberst_. _Wir nehmen Sie mit_ ,” the Englishman explained briefly. “ _Aber wir mussen einige Minuten warten_.”

“What is the delay? Why must we wait?” the middle-aged officer demanded,

Moffitt gestured toward the source of the sounds. “Some of your countrymen are on patrol at the moment, or perhaps they are seeking for you, sir. Part of our group are diverting their attention so you and I may move unseen.”

Colonel Krebel scowled, but there was little he could do to change matters.

The Englishman peered cautiously over the garden wall, and nodded. “Now— _mach’ schnell!”_ He and the German officer departed through the gate as the novice monk locked it behind them, and they made for the arranged rendezvous point.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

The clock read forty-seven minutes past eight a.m. when Arnheiter suddenly heard his own call sign on the frequency: _dah, dah, di-dit… di-di-dit_. _Dah, dah, di-dit… di-di-dit_. Z-S… Z-S … Z-S … He listened for a moment, _Ja, das ist Hitch. Ich kenne seine Hand_. He tapped the straight key with the prearranged reply, demanding the sender’s sign. W-S W-S W-S, came the reply: _di-dah-dah, di-di-dit… di-dah-dah, di-di-dit_.

Arnheiter smiled with relief, and sent “Ready to Receive”: _dah-di-dah_. 

Next came the Start of Message signal, _dah-di-dah-di-dah_ , twice, to indicate that the message was coming next. Then came the message itself: LVCFO VSCWA ITGWC LLHPO WANZP BWQAO PVMDC NDNRC QY789.

Arnheiter replied “Message Received”: _di-dah-dit_ , and repeated it.

Hitch sent one more signal indicating the time for the next contact, followed by “End of Message:” _di-dah-di-dah-dit_ , twice.

Arnheiter dutifully relayed the message to the MI office, and slowly took off his headset. He looked at the message form, where he had written the message as he heard it, then got the first one as well. He had been instructed that he was not to decipher or read the messages that he received from the Rat Patrol, only to expedite their reception at headquarters. But his training and instincts as a radioman were at odds with those directives. Besides that, if things had gone wrong for the Rats, he wanted to know. He didn't like the idea of sitting there blithely minding his own business if they were in trouble. What would Herr Hauptmann do? More to the point, what would Sergeant Troy do?

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

That made it simple. He decided to decipher both messages—the one from 0300, as well as the one which he had just received. He checked the list to see what Hitch's keywords had been. The first word, in clear text, was RADISH, which indicated he should use the first keyword of the list starting with R, which happened to be ROMANTIC. Knowing well how the Playfair grid cipher system worked, he filled in the grid with the keyword for the first message and deciphered it. "Arrived rendezvous all according to plan. No sight of enemy." Then he did the same for the second message: the indicator was CARROT, and the next C keyword was CREATION. He filled in a blank grid with letters and proceeded to decipher that one.

 _Ach, that's why they were late_... The message read "MAIL DELAYED NO PACKAGE YET UNEXPECTED VISITORS." In other words, there were German troops in the area, and they hadn't made the rendezvous yet. " _Himmel_ ," he said aloud. Carefully, he placed the deciphered messages in an olive drab envelope and locked it in the lower desk drawer. _That is my secret_ , he thought.

 _And there is nothing I can do to help them. Only der Herr Gott can do that_. _Next contact is in four hours._

Restless now, he roamed the house at loose ends. On his desk were the two most recent issues of _British Chess Magazine_ that Moffitt had brought back for him along with a packet of Bassett's Liquorice Allsorts, but he couldn't settle his mind to read the chess periodical. Finally, he sat down at the table in the parlor with his English books to work on the next lesson. All the time, however, while he was translating sentences, his mind kept returning to Troy and the Rats and this unknown colonel, and whatever had gone awry with the plan.

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

His musings were interrupted by a knock on the door. Startled, he bent to peer through the peephole to see who could possibly be at the door. He could see a basket at the doorstep, and the librarian's back and sensible shoes as she briskly walked away. Once she had gone, he opened the door and brought in the basket. It was the eggs that she gave to the men from her own henhouse in return for Hitch or Tully walking her dogs when they were available to do so. Informal agreements like that were quite common, he had discovered, as people creatively applied the rules regarding food rationing. As for himself, as a prisoner of war, he had his own allotted rations which he contributed to the household larder as they shared their British and U.S. military rations with him.

He carried the basket into the kitchen, and placed it on the sideboard. In the icebox, there was some bread, some cheese, and Spam that had been left for him to eat, and there were various other victuals as well... including one egg left from the week before. One egg by itself wasn't all that filling, but then he had an idea. There was a box in the cupboard with flour, and of course there was salt. Overcome by a sudden desire for noodles, he found a bowl and cracked the egg into it.

An hour later there was a pile of rolled and cut egg noodles drying on a linen tea towel on the table. He had not found anything like a rolling pin, but he had improvised with a washed and empty beer bottle. The making of egg noodles was as familiar to him as combing his hair or tying his shoes-- he had been helping his aunt and grandmother make noodles since he was tall enough to use a rolling pin on the table.

As he briskly cleaned up after his noodle making project, the telephone rang. It was not the house phone—it was the telephone in the radio room that was connected only to MacDonald's office at the Horse Guards. Arnheiter made his way to his room as fast as he was able to and seized the handset.

"Corporal," said Maj. MacDonald's familiar voice, but he sounded harried. "They got your message, but they're swamped in radio traffic from... never mind where,” he said hastily. “There's no one at present to handle that message; can you decipher it and tell me the content?"

"Yes, sir," Arnheiter replied. His instinct to decipher them himself had not been misplaced after all. "Please stand by, Major." In a few seconds, he had the deciphered message in his hand, and read it off to the Rats' superior.

"I see... Well, we’ll just have to await developments. Let me know as soon as you hear from them again. Thank you." The middle-aged Scotsman sounded amused. "You didn't just do that now, Corporal. Not that fast. You must have already deciphered it."

He'd been caught. Arnheiter sighed. "Yes, sir. I did."

"In spite of your orders not to read the messages?"

"Yes, sir." That would be the end of the project, he was certain, if he couldn't even obey a simple order for less than a day. "I wanted to discover why they were late in making contact," he added, knowing that the officer would not be interested in explanations or excuses.

To his astonishment, MacDonald chuckled with satisfaction. "Splendid. Well done, lad. You'll fit right in."

"Sir? _Ich -- ich verstehe nicht..."_ he blurted out in his native tongue.

"That rule about you not being allowed to decipher and read the messages from Troy and his men is a load of ... _es ist ein Misthaufen_ ," said the major, using the word for a farmyard manure pile. "It's all of a piece with the rule about locking up everything in the briefing room so you can't see it." _Courtesy of Colonel Hughes_ , MacDonald thought sarcastically, but he didn't say so. "So, direct orders from me, Corporal: decipher what they send you, but keep it secure. Don’t say anything about it. _Ist das klar?"_

" _Perfekt_."

MacDonald thought a moment, and went on. “If you can, stay on your frequency and keep listening… they may need contact sooner.”

“Yes, Major.” Arnheiter had already decided to do that.

“Good lad. Ring me if anything changes.”

“Yes, sir. Zu Befehl.” He hung up the telephone and put the headphones back on. To pass the time waiting, he took out pencils and sketchbook, which he had had very little time for since arriving in London. Starting with a traditional warmup exercise of a blind contour drawing, he began drawing his own hand, very slowly, while not looking at the paper or the lines he was making. Doing that always got him into the right frame of mind for drawing or painting, so he turned to the next blank page and began to draw the view out of the bedroom window, eyeballing the perspective as he worked rather than ruling in the formal perspective lines as he had been taught in school. The interesting lines and shadows of the wrought-iron fence across the street absorbed his attention as he drew, and time stood still.

The diversion Troy and Tully created was effective in drawing the German patrol away from the vicinity of the monastery, and Moffitt was able to get back to the outbuilding with Col Krebel in tow. Hitchcock was just securing the radio transmitter as they came in. “Did you reach him?” the English sergeant asked.

Hitch grinned. “Piece of cake. This is great— not like sending a message and wondering whether anyone heard it or not.”

Krebel frowned. “What now are we waiting for?”

“Begging your pardon, Colonel,” Moffitt explained. “We are waiting for the rest of our team to return. They were drawing off that patrol that we almost ran into. They should be here presently.”

But they weren’t. In fact, nearly an hour passed before Hitch spotted movement in the distant shrubbery, and saw two figures emerge from the trees. “There they are,” he said, pointing.

“Excellent,” replied Moffitt. “I was starting to worry that column had snatched them while they were on the way back here.”

“You and me both, Sarge.”

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

“It was a close thing,” Moffitt said, several hours later in the sitting room. “Krebel left it a bit late— another hour or two and they would have grabbed him themselves before we got there. We were just in time.”

“Yeah, got that right,” Troy agreed. “At first we thought it was just a patrol, but then they started shooting. Looks like they wanted the colonel too. But we all got out in one piece— Krebel’s gonna need a little patching up, but the Navy medic on the sub said it wasn’t serious. He should be all right.” He stifled a yawn. “You did fine. Keep up the good work.”

“Thank you,” Arnheiter said quietly. He held up his thumb and index finger, very close together. “What I do is very small, almost nothing. But it is still something.”

Tully shook his head. “It’s not nothing to us,” he asserted. “It’s good to know there’s someone over here listening for us… and cooking, too!”

The four Rats had been surprised to arrive an hour or so earlier to discover that dinner was cooked and waiting for them: fried Spam with egg noodles, and a batch of pea soup. “I am sorry,” the radioman had explained, somewhat abashed. “I only know to make German food. But I think you will come back tired and hungry.” Egg noodles were a new dish for both the Americans and Moffitt, being an important part of Scandinavian and German cuisine, but not common in most of the USA.

Troy eyed the young German, speculative. _He’s different somehow, just in two days. Something changed while we were gone. Not sure what… but he’s more assured, less uncertain. “_ And the Major is happy,” he added. “He says you did just fine. Anything you want to report?”

Arnheiter shook his head. “No. Nothing strange. _Alles in Ordnung._ ”

_Don’t know if I’ll ever get used to that,_ Troy thought to himself.

Then Hitch spoke up, grinning. “Sarge, does that mean we get to keep him?”

“Guess it does… That is, if you don’t have any objections,” Troy said, turning to address the man who was once Dietrich’s company clerk. “You sure you want to be stuck with us for the duration?”

“Is OK with me… Sarge,” he replied, trying out the unfamiliar expression for the first time. “I said it right?”

Troy chuckled. “You said it right.”

**.- ..-. .-. .. -.-. .-**

**Epilogue**

****

A few days later, Jack Moffitt stood, hands on hips, surveying the woodland around him, within sound of the stream that flowed through Wimbledon Common and Putney Heath. He turned to the man standing there beside him. “Well, it’s not your mountains at home, and it’s not the West Highlands. But it’s the largest area of heath and woodland in all of London— as unspoiled a place as there is. Will this do, old boy?”

Friedrich Arnheiter looked around, taking deep breaths, and then closed his eyes to listen. Then he nodded slowly, and smiled, a light coming into his blue eyes. “I hear birds,” he said. “Not cars. Yes. Thank you.” That was better.

“Mind, you can’t come here on your own, without us, and you’ll have to stay well clear of the Wimbledon Golf Club, the Tennis Club, and the Defence outpost. And you have to speak English lest you terrify the populace,” the English sergeant quipped, as they walked along the path through the trees. “But I’ve managed to get leave to show you the Iron Age hill fort that’s down by the golf course… that’s where we’re going now. And there’s an ancient road, the Icknield Way and the Ridgway, not an hour from here. They’re footpaths across the downs, surrounded by heathland as far as you can see—the oldest roads in Britain, and they were ancient well before the Romans came. I’ll take you there once the paperwork is sorted out... you can walk miles on that trackway if you like.” _The government shouldn’t mind that— it’s all moors and heath; there’s nowhere to run to even if he tried._

The two men continued on their way, dappled shadows dancing across their path as the breeze stirred the branches above them.


End file.
